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The DispatchThis Newsletter, June 2007
In This Issue:
- ACPA Spring Board Meeting (See Slideshow!)
- Concrete Pumping World Record
- Mandatory Operator Certification in Canada?
- Cool Stuff: Light Transmitting Concrete
ACPA Spring Board Meeting (See the Slideshow!)
 This year the ACPA Spring Board meeting was at Lake Las Vegas in NV. It was nice to be in "Vegas" and off of the strip for a change. The meetings were at the Ritz Carlton with folks staying all around. Much time was spent at this meeting discussing the upcoming educational conference in October. It's definitely going to be an event worth attending. Click here to see the slideshow.
Concrete Pumping World Record
While not yet the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai already wields another world record: the highest single-stage pumping of concrete. Unimix Readymix, the company behind the pumping issued a statement saying the following: "The previous record of 448 metres set at the 508-metre-high Taipei 101 building in Taiwan was surpassed by Unimix when Grade 80 MPa HPC was pumped vertically to a height of 452 metres at level 126 of the Burj Dubai."
Read more about the record here. You can also go to the official Burj Dubai website to learn more about this amazing structure.
Mandatory Operator Certification in Canada?
Our readers might be surprised to know that DispatchThis has a sizeable presence in Canada (Don't be, we've got customers in New Zealand, too!). From time to time we find news which will be of interest to our neighbors in the north.
This article, from the Journal of Commerce, discusses efforts to classify more skilled trades as compulsatory. This would require that work in these trades be performed by a fully certified skilled tradesperson or a registered apprentice. These efforts coincide with efforts to require that concrete pumpers undergo mandatory training before operating pumps. Read more about this story here.
Cool Stuff: Light Transmitting Concrete
From Optics.org: "The days of dull, grey concrete could be about to end. A Hungarian architect has combined the world's most popular building material with optical fiber from Schott to create a new type of concrete that transmits light.
"A wall made of 'LitraCon' allegedly has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of glass fibers can display a view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of a tree, for example."
Click here to read more... Click here for the Litracon website.
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