Chimney Woes & Wonders

We've just completed the slipform construction of the chimney in Iloilo.  Again, this is almost certainly the tallest structure on the whole of the island of Panay.

Under Construction

We managed to get off to a bad start.  The supplier for the concrete started coming up with a variety of excuses why they couldn't supply concrete.  Firstly it was because the cement hadn't arrived.  Then when the cement did arrive it was due to some paperwork issue.  Then they told us that they were restricted from operating for 24 hours, which for us is an absolute requirement for slipform work.  We were scuppered.  All dressed up and nowhere to go, so to speak.  Apparently (and there are many variations to this story) the local barangay captain (UK equivalent: barangay = ward/estate/district and captain = councillor) had decided that the noise from the batching plant would be too disruptive to the local community.  I'm not sure if he meant they wouldn't be able to hear their all-night karaoke and barking dogs over the noise of the batching plant-kind-of-disruptive.  Besides, the batching plant is located on the periphery of the district in a field some distance from the houses (and I use the term "houses" very loosely here) and our requirement is for 24 hour occasional supply, not 24 hour continuous supply.

In the event we were stood for 3 weeks trying to resolve this.  That's literally 3 weeks having to pay the entire workforce to do nothing.  But in the Philippines this doesn't matter because as a western company we have sack loads of money with bank notes spilling out of the tops laying around all over the place with nothing to spend them on.

What I failed to put across and get them to understand is that without a 24 hour supply we couldn't build the chimney.  Without a chimney there would be no power station.  Without a power station the local community would continue to have an intermittent power supply and some of the costliest electricity around.  Surely, 4 weeks of a bit of noise is a small price to pay for cheap(er) and a reliable electricity supply and a small sacrifice for the benefit of the whole city and island?  Besides, I'm having to go for 26 weeks without any proper sleep because of a multitude of barking dogs but no one cares about that.  This barangay captain, obviously a traffic warden in a past life, nearly managed to achieve what Greenpeace had failed to do and that was to prevent the power station from ever being built.  You can draw your own conclusions as to the reasons for the restriction, something I'm probably better off not openly speculating about here.

In the end we took a gamble and used an alternative batching plant on the other side of town.  It was a gamble because they were an unknown quantity and because they were on the other side of a city that had bad traffic problems at peak times, and the city had restrictions on truck movements during the day.  There were a number of other problems we had to resolve too.  To begin with they didn't have any money to buy cement (what kind of a business is that?) so we had to give them an advance payment.  Then the advance payment wasn't enough and we had to give them a further advance payment, all of which was extremely risky as if they had suddenly decided not to supply concrete to us after we had advanced them considerable sums of money we would have no doubt had a serious problem in recovering it.  

However, in the end they turned out to be wholly reliable and we completed the chimney in record time (97m in 19 days).  

Completed Windshield