Shoring, Bracing & Seismic Retrofit

Direction and duration. Shoring holds weight up. It goes in when a member carrying gravity load is about to come out, and it comes back down once the finished piece is doing its job again. Bracing resists sideways movement, the kind an earthquake or a windstorm puts into a building, and bracing is normally there for good. Plenty of jobs need both, in that order.

Usually, with the floor plan worked around them. A post needs solid bearing underneath and a clear footprint at its base, and forklift traffic has to route around the zone rather than through it. We tape the area off and mark every post so nobody clips one. Racking sitting directly under the shored bay is the part that generally has to move.

Until the finished repair is taking the load and the engineer releases it. That is the honest answer, because the clock gets set by material lead times and inspection dates more than by our crew. What you will get from us is the schedule we are working to, and a phone call if it slips. Posts left standing for months with nothing happening around them mean a job stalled.

It brings the building up to the standard the ordinance sets for existing buildings, which is a lower bar than a new one has to clear. Nobody can make an old building earthquake-proof, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. What a retrofit buys is a much better chance the place stands up and empties out, plus your address off the city’s list.