Guatemala Relief Trip July 11-20-2014
Day five  7-16-14

We were up at the crack of chicken and loaded up the materials for the church job in San Pablo. The earthquake shook this church enough to do some unsafe damage for the congregation. The two side walls had began to separate from the rafters and lean to about 10 inches out of plumb. This happened on both walls. The plan is to drill through the support columns and top bond beam and run cables from each outside wall. The cables will run through metal plates into the church attached to tension brackets. Once the cables are installed and tightened then will dig footers at the columns and use rebar to make a new support for the existing columns. Sounds complicated but it’s really not. The cool thing about working in countries such as this is if you can’t find it you make it. The prime example were the metal plates. We bought a 3/8 inch 4×8 sheet of metal and had it cut into the proper squares. We almost completed the cables today and tomorrow we will star preparing for the new support columns.

Kenny
GMSM