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SALT LAKE CITY — For Brad Bohne and his colleagues, the earthquake that shook Salt Lake City in March 2020 was a defining moment in the yearslong renovation of the Salt Lake Temple and Temple Square campus.
“(It) drove home how we are protecting this building; it wasn’t theoretical anymore,” said Bohne, the Jacobsen Construction general superintendent overseeing all work packages on the project. “It showed us some places where we needed to rethink our plans.”
Bohne shared this insight in an interview with Engineering News-Record, which on Monday published an in-depth feature story about the large and complex project. The magazine’s new piece goes into detail about the engineering complexity and long-term planning required to protect the temple from seismic activity, and the world-class artisanship being used to restore and enhance the interiors. ENR’s headline calls the project an “engineering feat.”
“To be able to strengthen what the pioneers did here and make it usable for people hundreds of years into the future is really an honor,” Andy Kirby, director of historic temple restoration for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told the magazine.
Kirby was referring to the original builders of the Salt Lake Temple, who completed it in 1893 after 40 years of construction. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints visit this temple, and others like it around the world, to participate in religious ordinances, including marriage ceremonies. Each temple is cherished by church members as a House of the Lord, with a spiritual significance beyond that of a typical meetinghouse.
Since January 2020, Jacobsen has led numerous trade, engineering and design partners in seismically strengthening the Salt Lake Temple, carefully renovating the interiors by installing and restoring specially tailored finishes, adding a new adjacent Visitors’ Center, and updating and beautifying the Temple Square grounds.
The seismic reinforcement of the 198-million-pound historical structure has required numerous custom-engineered solutions. These have included: installing 98 base isolators, wrapping massive new concrete transfer girders entirely around the foundation, installing and post-tension strengthening steel pipes under the original temple foundation, pumping voids in the original stone with high-strength grout, performing vertical coring through the temple columns and walls to make room for reinforcing steel cables, adding new steel trusses to the roof, strengthening all six temple spires with new steel supports, and more.
Mason Walters, a principal and lead engineer working on this renovation for Forell/Elsesser Engineers, agreed with Bohne’s assessment that the 5.7-mangitude earthquake that rattled the Salt Lake Valley on March 18, 2020, altered the course of the project.
“We realized the vertical accelerations were causing a lateral movement at the top of the spires, and that was something we’d not identified before,” Walters told ENR.
To read the full ENR feature story, click the tile below:
Article cover photo: Church Newsroom