The display withstood what Mother Nature had to offer!

We did have one shelter in the display that did not yet have the door installed. It was sitting on top of the shelter and remains missing to this day!

Click here to check out a few pictures of the display on our Facebook page & like us while you're there!

We supplied & installed (5) 4’ Inside Rise x 9’ Inside Span Precast Concrete Shooting Tunnels, each 8’ Long and secured (5) 8’ Tall Precast Concrete Retaining Wall Sections to the tops of the tunnels.

Our Precast Concrete Shooting Tunnels & Screen Walls were all installed in just under 7 hours.

Please take a moment to view the brief news story that Channel 10 News put together on the upgrades to their facility.

Click Here to access the Channel 10 News Story

Contact us today for all of your Above Ground Storm Shelter needs!

These requirements apply to the following:

·         Pretreatment (Trash) Tanks, relating to criteria for sewage treatment systems

·         Non-Standard treatment units

·         Pump Tanks

·         Holding Tanks

·         Septic Tanks

For a full list of these requirements please Click Here for details

In an effort to get people aware of our precast concrete shooting benches, we have launched a new website devoted to our shooting bench. Check it out and let us know what you think.

http://shooting-bench.com

We have put together a storm shelter informational video for you to watch so that you may make the best possible decision when protecting your family from a storm event. We hope you enjoy it. If you do have any questions or comments you can reach us toll free at (877) 827-8255 or email us a storm@vcpinc.net

Storm Shelter Impact Testing and Informational Video from Vaughn Concrete Products, Inc. on Vimeo.

Sometimes it’s the little things in life that keep us going strong. We can toil all day and a lifetime doing what we love to do in our jobs, and maybe we can even make some money at it. But that doesn’t always scratch the deepest itch of gratification.

There’s something more that needs to be seen than your name on a product, something more to be felt than a tidy profit in your pocket. Sometimes you just need someone to take notice, someone to recognize the drive and determination that got you to the head of the class, something to make it all worthwhile. It’s the feeling of accomplishment, the point of highest achievement – the raison d’être – when someone says, “Wow.”

Mike Vaughn, president of Vaughn Concrete Products (VCP) based in Henderson, Colo., puts forth an unusual amount of effort to hear that word, or some variation of it, from his customers. For him it all starts with a quality product and unrivaled customer service. More than just a company slogan, everyone at VCP strives to equate their name with reliability and the Wow Factor.

Early birds
Vaughn makes his point by telling the story about a deal he struck a few years ago on a box culvert project. Although his bid was 20 percent higher than another precaster’s, Vaughn told the contractor he could save him a lot of money by using his two-piece precast box culverts. The contractor didn’t believe him, so Vaughn promised to meet the competitor’s price for the culverts if the contractor would split the difference of the installation costs. Compared with the 13 days and $480 per hour required for the competitor’s product, Vaughn placed 540 feet of box culvert in 10 working hours on site.

On the day of installation, VCP was ready. “We had everything lined up the night before,” he said. “We started there at 5 in the morning. We had three people just hauling with trucks, so we always had something to unload.” Our crew knocked off at 4 that afternoon, then finished the job early the next morning. “Then (the contractor) said, ‘Wow,’” recalled Vaughn. “And that’s what we want, is the customer to say, ‘Wow.’ And they only have to say that once. That was just pretty neat.”

It’s common for Vaughn or his employees to hit the road early. In fact, few other precasters claim to have sleepers on their trucks. With two other precast plants in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Amarillo, Texas, his operation is spread fairly wide, and VCP products often have to spend a little more time on the road than those of most other precasters. But distance isn’t the only driving factor to leave the plant early with a delivery. VCP wants to have the product on site and ready to unload before the contractor’s workers arrive.

“Our trucks hit the road the night before or at 2 or 3 in the morning,” said Vaughn. “We’re there when (the contractors) show up to work.” By doing this, VCP trucks are the first to get unloaded. “If we show up at 9 or 10 o’clock, first off it disrupts the contractor’s production, and second it takes us a lot longer to get unloaded.”

With the Cheyenne plant about 90 miles to the north, the Amarillo plant about 435 miles to the south-southeast, plus factoring in the wide-open spaces of the West and the long distances company trucks often drive, VCP’s trucks may conceivably be 1,500 miles apart on a given day. Yet VCP employees communicate with the office so everyone stays informed and on top of all the operations so that they can be assured the Vaughn name is living up to its promises.

Rolling office
Vaughn is not one to sit in his office all day, unless you consider his truck a mobile office. He is a hands-on kind of guy who has no hesitancy to jump inside his own truck to make a delivery or crawl under it for a little maintenance. The outside of the Kenworth semi brandishes his name on the door; the inside is equipped with a laptop with a satellite internet connection (the cell phone with a fax machine attachment were put out of service at the end of 2007).

This is the environment in which he learned the precast trade. While growing up, he would help out on the family farm and in the plant. “When I turned 16 and was old enough to drive, I was a delivery person, because I could make deliveries and still come back and work,” he said. At 17 years of age when high school let out for the three months in summer, he hit the road. “I would easily put 50,000 miles on a semi truck. And that was good experience.”

Those were the years when Vaughn also learned his mechanical skills. A small company such as VCP owns only so many trucks, so if one went down for repairs there was little choice but to get it back on the road as quickly as possible. The same was true for other equipment such as forklifts. “When a truck went down back then, it was in the shop and it would normally roll out the next morning,” said Vaughn. “That was a good learning experience as well.”

These days, trucks are just as much advanced technologically as they are complicated, with computerized components that often require factory-trained technicians and expensive diagnostic equipment. “The older trucks we can still work on,” said Michael Greenrod, plant manager, explaining that they take the newer ones to a local dealership. “We used to just take them apart and fix them and put them back together,” said Greenrod, a 23-year veteran at VCP.

Still, Vaughn can usually tell what’s wrong with a rough-running diesel engine just by listening to it. “That’s one thing that’s a little bit different about our operation. There isn’t any one of the trucks or trailers or boom trucks or piece of machinery I couldn’t tell you where we got it and where we would need to get parts for it,” he said. “I’m proud of that. There are not a lot of people that know much about their machinery; that’s what I do.”

He has performed every job at the plant, and since the company fabricates its own forms, he has had a hand in building most of those as well. “That makes a lot of difference in how successful you are and how well you know your costs.”

Quality begins at home
VCP originally took root in the excavating business that Vaughn’s parents, Johnie and Pat Vaughn, started in 1962. Business came in the form of Johnie grading houses, installing water lines and septic systems, and Pat keeping the books. After a few years they realized that they were putting in more and more septic systems, which eventually led to supply-and-demand problems as well as quality problems.

“We couldn’t get quality tanks, and we couldn’t get tanks when we needed them,” said Vaughn. “And we had years where we put in an awful lot of tanks – we put in as many as a couple of thousand a year.” And so began Vaughn Concrete Products. By 1970, the company was concentrating heavily on the precast side of the business. It continued with the excavating business until the early ’80s, and then it was all precast manufacturing.

At about the same time, Johnie and Pat decided that if they could cast septic tanks successfully, they could manufacture other products as well. A decline in building construction resulted in less need for septic tanks, but the agriculture industry was strong, so they started producing precast agricultural products such as feed bunks and cattle guards. The Cheyenne plant was in full production by 1983, and they started operations at the Amarillo plant in 1989.

Today a large portion of the business centers on utility vaults. “We build utility vaults from 2 feet by 2 feet on up to 16 feet by 30 feet,” said Vaughn. “The biggest piece I think we’ve ever built was 142,000 pounds.” Other offerings include grease interceptors, oil field products, storm shelters, landscaping items and transportation products.

Despite the growth, VCP employs a total of about 60 people and has kept its small-business mentality. Everyone on staff is focused on customer service. A phone call to the office, for example, will be answered by a live person rather than a recording – there is no voice mail here. And typically the caller won’t have to speak to more than one or two people to get immediate answers to their questions.

When NPCA plant certifications came into existence back in 1987, VCP quickly jumped on board. “We were the 14th plant to become certified,” said Vaughn. At the time, it was a bold statement to show that the company had indeed set itself apart from other plants. “That was before the time DOTs were requiring it or even knew much about it.”

In 1991 VCP won the Wyoming Governor’s Quality Award, which focuses on leadership, management, customer service and results. “That was pretty nifty for a small business like we had,” said Vaughn.

Innovators
Despite the company’s small size, VCP is very innovative – not only with its customer service, but also with the products and forms it manufactures. The Water Mill, for example, is a windmill-shaped, decorative water vending station that has proved to be a popular item. It consists of a precast kiosk that contains water purification components for a company that sells and services them across the country. “We’ve got them in Florida, we’ve got them in California, we even have some up in the northeast part of the country,” said Vaughn. “They had started with wood, and they needed something that would satisfy, at that time, the Uniform Building Code so they wouldn’t have problems getting permits and so forth. Now we’ve got them in all areas of the United States.” Vaughn explained that other precast manufacturers scoffed at manufacturing the water mill buildings because of various engineering obstacles, such as figuring out how to get the product to release from the unusual configuration of the form.

Above-ground storm shelters represent another product that has done well for VCP. “They are made to go in people’s garages or on their back porches,” said Vaughn. “We also make free-standing units that can go out in somebody’s back yard.” The above-ground storm shelters are available in four standard sizes and meet all the requirements of the National Storm Shelter Association standard.

Yet another product that has caught a lot of attention is Vaughn’s entry in NPCA’s most recent Creative Use of Precast (CUP) Awards competition. VCP tied for second place in the Above Ground category. Vaughn’s entry, titled “Vertical Axis Wind Energy Turbine Structure,” consists of one 32-foot-tall curved airfoil section comprised of four 4-foot-wide by 15-foot-long by 8-foot-tall solid sections stacked together and two 12-foot-wide by 32-foot-tall by 12-inch-thick solid panels that channel wind into a turbine to create an energy system that generates power.

“We’re pretty diversified,” said Vaughn. “We’re not the big-volume people – we try to be the details people. We cross t’s and dot i’s very well, and that’s what has been a success for what we do.” That plays into the whole VCP concept. Vaughn is comfortable with the fact that he knows his customers can rely on VCP. “They know they’ll get the response and they’ll be taken care of.”

Johnie and Pat Vaughn are still very involved in the day-to-day operation of VCP. Mike Vaughn’s wife, Karen, and children Ann (a high school senior) and Adam (a college freshman) work part-time for VCP. Daughter Sydney, 3, “just livens the place up,” the Vaughns said. “It is definitely a family owned and operated business.”

Mike Vaughn is a registered engineer in seven states, but he isn’t taken in too much by the fact. “Those seven engineering licenses on the wall aren’t really where I’ve got my education,” he explained. His parents taught him, “Education comes from knowing what people’s problems are and knowing what our problems are and being able to find a solution to fix them,” he said.

But it’s really more than that. “The thing I like people to say is ‘Wow.’ When somebody says, ‘Oh, that’s neat,’ then that made the whole thing worthwhile.”

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Precast Gets Tolerant

Tight tolerance requirements on troughs at a Denver water treatment plant were best handled by precast concrete.

By Bridget McCrea

As one of Colorado’s primary water utilities, Denver Water can’t afford to have any of its water treatment plants out of commission for any length of time. With 2,499 miles of water pipelines, 17 pumping stations and 34 underground reservoirs located throughout the city of Denver, the utility is responsible for the collection, storage, quality control and distribution of drinking water to nearly one-quarter of all Coloradoans. More than one million people and more than 14,000 fire hydrants in the Denver Metro area rely on its services on a daily basis.

Denver Water’s treatment plants employ conventional process designs consisting of coagulation/sedimentation, filtration and disinfection processes. The plants must meet all the standards set by the state of Colorado and the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act, according to Martin Garcia, the utility’s project engineer. But some of the plants are old – built back when the utility started operations in the 1920s.

For Denver Water, opening a new plant and closing an old one requires meticulous attention to detail and years of planning. Four years ago, Denver Water knew its Marston Water Treatment Plant needed a major overhaul to bring it up to speed. The plant, with a capacity of 180 million gallons of water per day, was built back in 1924. After careful consideration, the utility took the plunge and decided to spend $36 million to replace it with a new facility.

“Marston was getting old and replacement parts were getting hard to find,” says Garcia, “so we decided to tear it down and start from scratch.” Between 1999 and 2001, Denver Water designed its new plant, then put the engineering and construction out for bid in 2001. Some of the key components were 96 precast concrete water troughs measuring 2-feet by 23-feet 10-inches by 2 feet 4 inches. Construction started on the new plant in 2001 and was wrapped up this September.

Steve Price, senior project manager for CDM, an engineering firm based in Cambridge, Mass., says his company won the bid to design the project. “They had an aging infrastructure and wanted to expand and be able to treat more water,” says Price. “It was time for a replacement.”

Careful Consideration
Getting Denver Water’s new plant from concept to completion meant running the existing plant while building the new plant to avoid having to shut down Marston’s 180-million-gallon production stream. Most critical, says Garcia, were the stringent tolerances that the project required. The top edge of the troughs couldn’t have more than 1/16-inch deflection in their 23-feet 10-inch lengths.

Garcia says the tight tolerances were necessary because of the water that rises up in the plant’s filter during the backwash process. “We want it to fill evenly into the trough so that we don’t get more water in one section than in another,” he explains. “If we do get more in one section, it can upset the media.”

Price says precast concrete was the right choice based on the stringent tolerances and the need for structural longevity – after all, the new plant would replace one that lasted for 79 years. “We debated between fiberglass and precast,” he recalls. “After several discussions with Denver Water, we decided to use precast, mainly because of the longevity factor.”

According to Garcia, precast concrete has been Denver Water’s “material of choice” for many years. “Fiberglass was ruled out early because concrete is much more durable,” he says, adding that the “ready to go” aspect of precast concrete made it much more attractive than the poured-in-place option.

“When they were delivered to the site, the troughs were prepped and ready for installation with no extra work required,” adds Garcia. “That cut down on the time involved with, say, poured-in-place troughs that would need forms, time to cure and everything else. Using another option would have definitely added more time to the schedule.”

Mike Vaughn, president of Vaughn Concrete Projects Inc. in Henderson, Colo., says Denver Water chose precast not only for its permanence, but for its ease of installation as well. “If they had installed fiberglass troughs, I’m sure they would have had difficulty in supporting the troughs to minimize distortion, deflection and anchorage problems,” he says.

According to Vaughn, the original Marston water treatment plant was constructed with concrete wash-water troughs that probably wouldn’t have met Denver Water’s new tolerance specifications. Nor could they have expedited the project the way the precast troughs did. “Doing it the original way would have easily doubled the installation time,” says Vaughn.

Pizzagalli Construction Co. of South Burlington, Vt., and Construction Consultants Inc. (CCI) of Falls Church, Va., were joint-venture partners who handled the general contracting for the Marston project.

Pizzagalli and CCI got involved with the project in 2001 after winning the bid to complete the work. Bryan Rufer, Pizzagalli’s mechanical project manager, says that for the troughs, precast concrete worked well because of the project’s tight tolerance requirements. “We could have fabbed them on site,” he says, “but we chose to have them precast based on both the fabrication tolerances and the installation tolerances.”

Jumping Hurdles
If designing and manufacturing 96 precast concrete troughs and hauling them out to a job site for installation sounds like a routine job, think again. Between the tight tolerances and the fact that an existing plant had to continue running adjacent to the new plant, the Marston Water Treatment Plant was no ordinary job for the engineers, contractors or the manufacturers involved.

For starters, working at a busy job site over a two-year period where a water treatment plant is still running while a new one is under construction is hard enough. Vaughn says his company was “always the first in the gate every morning when the site opened.” The punctuality allowed the precaster to back its truck up to a large crane and unload the troughs before the site got too congested. “The site being busy didn’t cause much of a problem for us,” says Vaughn, “but I know it did for the contractor.”

From the engineering perspective, Price says the design challenges included the ability to maintain the existing plant’s land operations during construction. “We worked it out with a consensus-type process with the existing plant operations,” says Price.

Adding to the challenges, says Garcia, is the fact that the two plants were connected by pipes, making it difficult to get the new plant up and running while maintaining the existing plant. To circumvent the challenge,they shut down both plants at two different intervals to do all the necessary maintenance on the old plant. Garcia says that overall, the installation of the 96 troughs went smoothly and that no extra work was necessary to get them in place.

One change that took place during the manufacturing process, says Garcia, was a request from the precast manufacturer to build flat-bottomed troughs as opposed to the original V-shaped bottom troughs, although the internal part of the trough would retain its V-shape. Denver Water agreed to let Vaughn Concrete Products Inc. make the design change, based on the fact that the troughs would be easier to form and easier to stack.

“We’ve been testing and backwashing the troughs and haven’t seen any problems as a result of that design change,” says Garcia.

Precise Measures
Vaughn says his company got involved with the Marston project in January 2002 and wrapped up its portion of the project early this year. The project itself was a tricky one, mainly because of the specified geometry and the precision with which the tops of each trough had to be manufactured.

“There couldn’t be more than 1/16 of an inch of distortion in 24 feet because the units were acting as a weir for the water to run over,” Vaughn says.

Vaughn and a representative from Denver Water sat down together at 10:30 one evening to nail down the details and come to terms on the price. After the meeting, Vaughn and his team reviewed the structural design, taking into consideration both the long-term and short-term deflections to assure that the structures wouldn’t sag with time, and that they wouldn’t exceed the strict tolerances.

“We then went ahead and built the forms for the troughs,” says Vaughn, adding that another challenging aspect of the project was the fact that the structures were going to be fully engulfed with water. Because of this, the structures had to be designed in a way that would cradle or support one end while the other end was cast into a wall structure.

“That certainly created a bit of a challenge during the manufacturing process,” Vaughn says, “but we worked around that with a good, structurally sound design.”

Once the project was underway, Denver Water made another request of Vaughn Concrete: a smoother finish on the troughs. Not part of the project’s original specifications, Vaughn says his company altered its production and vibration techniques to ensure that the resultant finish was satisfactory.

“They wanted a considerably smoother finish than what was specified,” he says. “After some experimenting, we were able to accommodate their request and everything worked out OK.”

Satisfaction Guaranteed
After four years of careful planning, design and installation, the new and improved Marston Water Treatment Plant began full-scale operations in September, much to the delight of the utility itself and the numerous companies that played key roles in replacing the 79-year-old plant with a more modern, functional version.

According to Rufer, all 96 troughs are serving their intended purpose, and all were backwashed multiple times before use. Garcia says Vaughn Concrete did a “very good job,” particularly when it came to meeting the stringent tolerances that the project required.

Vaughn toured the job site with the contractor after the installation was completed. “Everyone seemed very happy with the outcome,” he says. “Denver Water’s expectations were definitely met and everything is working well.”

Project Profile
Project: Marston Water Treatment Plant Upgrade
Owner: Denver Water
Architectural/Engineering Company: CDM, Cambridge, Mass.
Contractor/Installer: Pizzagalli Construction Co., South Burlington, Vt., and Construction Consultants Inc., Falls Church, Va.
Precast Manufacturer: Vaughn Concrete Products, Henderson, Colo. *
* Vaughn Concrete Products is a certified plant under NPCA’s Quality Assurance/Plant Certification program.