Cement

By Vince Basehart

March 28 -- Standard Concrete Products' ten story-tall cement factory has loomed over the intersection of 19th and Colorado for the past 50 years. Most of Santa Monica's sidewalks laid down since World War II have been made out of the company's hard stuff.

The Lens, drawn by the great mechanical clanking of it all, wandered over there one recent afternoon to check it out.

Up close, this towering, eggnog-colored beast resembles a cross between an Apollo launch pad and a cannery. It is dominated by seven large silos connected by chutes and conveyor belts, tubes and pipes, held together by a massive steel framework. Workers gain access to all of this machinery by climbing a series of metal stairs and terror-inducing catwalks.

Its purpose is to receive, store, and mix all sorts of sand, gravel and rock -- "aggregate" in the industry's parlance -- and feed it in the form of concrete to a fleet of yellow cement mixer trucks which go out to various jobs throughout Southern California.

Multiple signs declare the place, in no uncertain terms, a "Hard Hat Area."

Beside the plant is a sad little two-story building clad in rusting corrugated metal. I climb its stairs and open the door to what is essentially the command center of the place.

Inside the wood paneled office, 31-year old Vincent keeps an eye on two video monitors. Each one is divided into four parts, providing him with eight separate camera views of what's going on inside the plant. One view shows a conveyor belt feeding gravel into a hopper.

Vincent points to a bank of computer screens, each of which display a variety of multi-colored graphs. "These measure the weights," of the different materials the plant is processing at any time. "We need to make sure we have the right amounts of aggregate and water when we load."

Just as the precise amounts of flour, sugar and butter are critical to a successful cookie dough, the right mixture of gravel, sand, one inch rock and water is critical to a successful batch of concrete, only much more so: bridges don't crumble when a baker blows his batch of Lorna Doones.

Vincent hands me a hard hat covered with union stickers to wear, and I happily follow his co-worker, Richard, outside and down the stairs for a guided tour.

Richard is deeply tanned from a career outdoors.

A large grate sits over a pit which houses a conveyor system. A sign refers to it as "The Grizzly." "I’m not sure why they call it that," Richard explains. "It could be that when it's operating it sounds like a Grizzly bear growling."

Indeed. We have to raise our voices to be heard. The plant sounds like a hyperactive percussion section. All around us combustion engines chug; pumps pump; gravel rattles like hail into metal buckets; compressors spit air at odd intervals; steel funnels gargle rocks; conveyor belts clatter.

Richard explains how the raw material is delivered by trucks and dumped into the Grizzly, where it is brought up by a series of rotating escalator buckets to be poured into the massive storage containers above us called "bunkers."

Only after all the different materials are precisely measured and mixed will water be added, at the last minute, to the dry ingredients. Cement mixer trucks sit idling in the yard, waiting their turn to back up to the dock beneath the massive structure and be fed their ten ton load of builders' Bisquick.

A knee-deep layer of loose, grey aggregate covers the ground beneath the plant. Each piece of rock, sand, pea gravel, fly ash, silica and grit has a unique purpose in the alchemy of concrete. Richard knows them all.

I ask if I may climb the stairs to take a look, but Richard smiles and shakes his head no. This is the kind of factory where ill-fated Warner Brothers cartoon characters get entangled, and after a long process of mechanized mangling set to orchestra music, end up blinking at the audience from a block of cement.

Richard is right. I will instead admire the company's products during my next sidewalk stroll.