Masonry Magazine October 1970 Page. 22
Oregon Masonry Guild
Hosts Building Officials
Architects, engineers, building officials, mason contractors and out of state special research masonry specialists shared a luncheon seminar recently in Portland as guests of the Oregon Masonry Guild.
Speaker of the day was Walter Dickey, Consulting Engineer for Masonry Research of Los Angeles. The title of Dickey's comments was, "Changes in the 1970 Uniform Building Code".
Dickey outlined recent changes noted in the attitude toward masonry products and construction techniques, from the designing engineer and architect to the man on the wall.
Research groups are assisting the industry by constant study in finding answers to seismic problems in zones 2 and 3 and wind loads found on the Pacific Coast. The apparent "erosion" of the masonry industry a few years back has now been eliminated by these research studies.
A new word was introduced to many present, namely "damping" given as the ability of masonry to absorb earthquake shocks. Tests show that clay brick has a 9% response or vibration absorption and concrete block shows a 17-20% response to critical damping. This is very important in the engineering of a building in making a computer analysis when designing for earthquake zone 2 or 3 requirements.
Special guests included masonry industry leaders attending the Conference of Building Officials. Included in the group were Robert W. Harrington, Masonry Institute, San Francisco; Alan H. Yorkdale, SCPI, McLean, Virginia; Kevin D. Callahan, NCMA, Arlington, Virginia and Leland Sphar, Concrete Products Association of Washington, Seattle.
GPC's Earnings Up
General Portland Cement Company has reported second quarter and first half earnings for 1970 higher than last year.
Chairman and chief executive officer L. James Wade, Jr. said that the company earned $2,260,000, or 43¢ per share for the second quarter, compared with $1,776,000, or 34¢ per share for the same period a year ago.
He reported first half total earnings of $3,085,000, or 59¢ per share. That compares with $2,810,000, or 54¢ per share for 1969. Net sales for the first half of 1970 increased 14% to $48,031,000 from $42,206,000 for the corresponding period last year.
Wade said that both sales and earnings for the second quarter this year were below expectations because of reduced construction activity, particularly in the Texas and Midwest markets.
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Soaring Wage Rates
(Continued from page 11)
According to Fortune, the building trades which include eighteen unions with nearly three million members in 10,000 locals, are able to do all this because they control the labor supply and have created an artificial labor shortage. Taking advantage of the industry's fragmentation, they have used that shortage to push up their wages much faster than manufacturing and other industrial wages.
No Help From Nixon
President Nixon could make political capital of the issue if he took the trouble to explain and dramatize the way in which union exactions fall on the consumer. But Nixon appears to have been boxed in by his hard-hat supporters. As one prominent Administration official puts it, "The hard-hats' well-staged and organized support of the Nixon foreign policy, obviously planned at high levels, has made it impossible to get through to the President. The hard-hats knew exactly what they were doing, and the gains they could exact."
New Jersey Consultant
Offers Scheduling System
"Critmark", a critical path scheduling system with a ten-year history of use in the United States by major construction firms, is being offered on an installed basis by a New Jersey consultant.
S. Wallach Co., Inc. of Madison, developed the system more than ten years ago for use in its consulting work.
An early problem in using CPM for clients who require complex answers in a hurry was tedious manual network preparation. Wallach's solution, the use of precedence listings as input, showed dramatic cuts in preparation time. Throughputs use only a tenth of the time of currently available methods.
GOOD WINTERTIME HABIT
Now is a good time to get back into the wintertime habit of watching out for ice and slippery snow on sidewalks and steps, in the street and near your parked car, and on any outdoor platforms, scaffolds, runways or ramps where you may be working.