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SALT LAKE CITY — Vertical coring at the Salt Lake Temple renovation is finished after three years of meticulous work, marking the completion of a critical seismic reinforcement effort on the project.
A total of 46 holes were drilled from the top of the temple’s six towers and the north and south walls, all the way down to the new upper foundations, the Church Newsroom said in its latest project update. These holes were then filled with post-tension steel cables that were connected to the foundation and tightened to strengthen the whole structure against seismic events. The holes, 150-feet long on average, were all kept straight within a three-eighths of an inch tolerance along their entire length.
Nathan Espinoza, Jacobsen Construction project engineer, explained that as the cables are tightened and activated to support their target load, “they essentially sandwich the structure and provide a structural rigidity.”
In all, more than 2.5 miles’ length of stone was removed during the vertical coring process. In close collaboration with Paul Lawrence, the Jacobsen project manager who is leading Work Package 3 on the Salt Lake Temple & Temple Square Renovation, the team at West Coast Cutting & Coring Group spent many thousands of hours methodically coring through the stone. Their coring work has been the most time-intensive single activity on the project.
“There (were) so many challenges, but little by little we overcame those challenges and developed to a point where no matter what the building (threw) at us, we (were) prepared,” said Ken Thornton, superintendent with West Coast Cutting & Coring Group.
The Church Newsroom’s latest update also described the following areas of ongoing progress on the renovation:
- The Temple Square grounds continue to be beautified with new statues.
- Construction work on the temple’s baptistries, instruction rooms and sealing (marriage) rooms — some of which are included in the building’s nearly 300,000-square-foot underground addition — will wrap up soon.
- Stone cladding is being added to the west entry pavilion at North Temple.
- The north addition’s basement level is undergoing finish work.
The announcement that vertical coring is now complete at the Salt Lake Temple received coverage from news outlets with a combined online reach of 200 million. Outlets that covered the story included Yahoo! News, KUTV 2 News, LDS Living, the Deseret News and more. Click each outlet’s news headline tile below to explore their coverage: