Empire Built On Sand. Businessman allegedly poured inferior concrete into key projects [bridges]

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | July 9, 2006 | Jaxon Van Derbeken

[John Jorsett]

Ricardo Ramirez seemed an unlikely success story: At 57, the former Marine Corps judo instructor had spent more than 20 years as a paving contractor and had little to show for it but a long string of lawsuits, business failures and bankruptcies.

Then, in 1998, the struggling businessman appeared to hit upon a way to make it in a new venture. Taking advantage of city and state programs designed to help minority-owned businesses, Ramirez started turning out low-priced, locally produced concrete for projects that included earthquake retrofit work on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. By 2003, his Pacific Cement venture was supplying a third of the concrete used in San Francisco's public works projects.

Prosecutors now believe it was an empire of sand.

Ramirez built Pacific Cement on a combination of moxie, deceit and greed, prosecutors say, only to have it crumble. Left behind, they say, was a costly and potentially dangerous legacy: tons of substandard concrete built into vital public structures.

Ramirez, now 65, faces charges of grand theft and fraud for allegedly passing off inferior recycled concrete -- a cheaper material that is more prone to wear, cracks and water penetration -- as meeting higher durability standards for the Golden Gate Bridge and a Burlingame wastewater treatment plant. He has pleaded not guilty.

[ASOC]

Been some years, but in the USAF the boilerplate (certify drug-free, recycled paper used, all that cr@p) ran 38 pages, single spaced, double sided.

And the specification written by the Govt are often incomprehensible....

I reviewed submissions for a company I worked a while back. The Gov't specs were so strange they were either written by an idiot (possible), rigged so only one outfit could bit (it happens), or the writer was just plain clueless and did a cut and paste from another contract or another's bases contract (happens a lot).

Blech and then some. Glad to be out of it, tho the pay was prety sweet.

[TXnMA]

Slump tests among others are required and have to be certified when doing DOT or state work.

Could it be that this guy had his own "slump test inspector" on the payroll, and he was providing pre-cast concrete components -- with faked cement quality test data...?

[Question_Assumptions]

Japan was having problems with concrete in the tunnels for their bullet train. It seems that the concrete company used beach sand. You are supposed to wash beach sand before using it in concrete to get the salt out. The contractors didn't. It started to fall apart.

[ninonitti]

I always feel a little uncomfortable driving over a bridge ---- built by the lowest bidder.

I'm a residential remodeling contractor and I am still chuckling at a friend who built a beach house with the guy who came in 200K below what I thought the job was worth. He's in court with original guy and now finishing up the job as his own general contractor.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

How’d this miserable little bastard manage to qualify for the minority programs? His business should have never gotten off the ground!

[jimfree]

These set-aside programs often permit a minority bidder to win with a slightly higher price. This theoretically would allow the government to command equal or higher quality from the “disadvantaged” firm. You can command all you want but if you don’t have the mechanisms to ensure quality (good past performance record or some kind of good QA/QC procedures or measures on the materials and workmanship), this is what you will eventually get.

[Psycho_Bunny]

This dillrod could have had it all....too bad he blew it.

[Eye of Unk]

Sounds more to me that his aggragates were basically ground up old concrete that could have had any amount of contaminates from topsoil, petroleum residue, rubber or who knows what, I could just picture he may have gotten ahold of the detrius of the last earthquakes concrete remains and who knows what was in the mix design.There had to be onsite inspectors getting a payout to falsefy the cores.

[dalereed]

“There are supposed to be regular testing of the concrete batches that would catch the issue before the bad concrete was in place.”

The only testing is hardness which crushed concrete used as aggrigaate doesn’t affect.

What it does affect is the water absorbson which isn’t tested for.

When they first demanded that old concrete and left over redimix be reprocessed all the redimix companies were using it for aggigate and there were a lot of “hot” loads which were a bitch.

They no longer use it and it’s mostly used for base under roadbeads.