Category: Uncategorized

Construction photos: week 12

After (the short) week 11, things really got moving in week 12, in an “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” kinda way. It turns out that a network of 30+ 4″ PVC pipes is just not that simple, and in order to handle the (minimal) pipe-crossing that the design required, we needed to define at least two distinct levels for the pipes to travel. The problem is that the 4″ PVC is about thick enough that those two levels cannot both be above the footings. So the backhoe came back to dig some trenches…lots of them:

Mayhem

But instead of getting all bummed out about the number of foundation walls dismantled for the backhoe’s work (or because they were crushed as the backhoe rode across them), let’s look at the progress that was made. First, Grand Central is now starting to look real:

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Starting a carbon neutral conversation

Yesterday I was thrilled to discover that Manifold Recording was the #1 Google result for the search term “carbon neutral recording studio“. I know that such a goal (achieving carbon neutrality, not the Google ranking) is a challenging one, and thus it makes sense to test the assumptions, even this early in its construction.

This morning I heard Alice Lloyd, Executive Director of North Carolina Interfaith Power & Light speak out against Duke Power’s plan to expand the Cliffside power plant with an additional 800MW of coal-fired capacity. As reported by the News and Observer (and contradictory to statements made in their “clean coal” coalition statements), the only way to bring this plant on line is to bend already broken rules related to mercury pollution, and to continue to ignore the enormous impact of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, further exacerbating global warming. The statistics are alarming:

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