Signal-Rite LLC Remote compensator

Las Vegas is hearing heavy metal, not from the usual clink and clatter of slot machines, but from the heavy iron flexing its muscles on some of the country’s largest, most ambitious projects. The city’s famed Strip, a four-mile-long swath of Las Vegas Boulevard, is lined with hulking mega-resort casinos that are constantly being renovated, expanded, imploded and built anew to turn concrete and steel into cash.

The Strip has a dizzying amount of work under way, with $41.4-billion of hotel, casino and convention construction through 2012, reports the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Yet those numbers could grow even greater as another $25.97 billion of tentative projects are now planned for development.

Construction is Las Vegas’ second-largest and second-fastest employer, trailing only the hospitality sector, reports the Nevada Dept. of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. It was responsible for 103,000 jobs in southern Nevada in December nearly 10% of the region’s total employment and generated $14.7 billion in annual economic activity.

But not everyone is geared to handle the Strip’s fast-paced action. The Las Vegas gaming giants that fuel the building frenzy expect no-excuse prompt results. The sooner a mega-resort opens, the quicker it can generate revenue. The hectic pace means using equipment around the clock.

“Las Vegas is definitely more schedule-driven than other markets,” says Daniel P. McQuade, president of Tishman Construction Corp of Nevada, which is serving as construction manager on two of the city’s biggest projects, Echelon and CityCenter. “It’s geared toward getting projects done quickly. There is more equipment on a Las Vegas project running more hours a week. Equipment, as result, is seemingly better maintained since it’s so heavily used.”

Signal-Rite LLC Remote compensator allows workers to hoist slab tables at angles, speeding placement.

Still, the push for fast delivery resulted in a rash of jobsite fatalities in 2007. There were 13 worker-related deaths along the Strip, with mega-projects CityCenter, Fontainebleau and Cosmopolitan accounting for six. It marks a record single-year fatality count for Las Vegas, reports Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Tishman is overseeing work on Boyd Gaming Corp.’s $4.8-billion, 5,000-room Echelon mixed-use development on the Strip, between Circus Circus and the future Plaza Las Vegas. The 87-acre, eight-building complex calls for five hotels, a 650,000-sq-ft convention center, a 300,000-sq-ft retail mall and a 140,000-sq-ft casino. Echelon, which officially broke ground June 19, will see 5,000 workers on site during the peak of construction activity. It’s scheduled to finish in the third quarter of 2010.

One of the most noticeable trademarks of Vegas construction is the amount of cranes littering the sky. The 640-ft-high Hotel Echelon, 540-ft-high Enclave and 430-ft-high Shangri-La share a tri-wing superstructure, and are built using five Linden Comansa 21LC400 model flat-top tower cranes, with 164-ft-long jibs and 39,670-lb lifting capacities, and up to 308-ft-per-minute maximum line speeds. Multiple cranes are needed to reach across the 600-ft-long building, which contains up to 80,000-sq-ft floor plates.

Nevada Ready Mix Inc., Las Vegas, has a 300-cu-yd-per-hour batch plant on site to place the project’s 700,000 cu yd of concrete. Marnell Corrao Associates, Las Vegas, is the concrete contractor. The complex will also use 80,000 tons of steel.

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Perini Building Co.

Perini Building Co. Cosmopolitan carries $50,000-a-day completion bonuses or penalties.

Echelon rests atop 266 caissons up to 180 ft deep and 6 ft in diameter, drilled with Bauer BG40 rigs. Yet its vertical construction relies on six dual-car Alimak Scando 650 rack-and-pinion hoists with 7,100-lb capacity at 300 ft per minute. The hoists are among the fastest available and will be showcased by the Stockholm-based manufacturer at the CONEXPO-CON/AGG trade show, held March 11-15 in Las Vegas.

An encouraging sign for Vegas, but perhaps not the rest of the country, is clearing the bottleneck for equipment supplies. “Although the size and scale is larger, we haven’t experienced any problems with equipment availability. We received four bids on the tower cranes and seven bids on the hoists,” says Bill Stanton, Tishman’s executive vice president of procurement. “We think that our project is coming out off the ground at a good time when some other projects are finishing and others are being canceled.”

A softening U.S. economy, rising inflation and tightening credit markets led New York-based Moody’s Investors Service to warn of a default rate of up to 12% in 2008. The slowdown subsequently loosened the availability of domestic machinery, despite strong demand from rapidly industrializing countries such as China, Malaysia and India.

The $2.9-billion Fontainebleau Las Vegas, like its neighbor Echelon, has experienced no difficulty in acquiring equipment. The 63-story, 3,889-room mega-resort is located at the northeast corner of Las Vegas and Rivera boulevards. Developed by Fontainebleau Resorts LLC, the 25-acre development consists of 1,000 condo-hotel units, a 100,000-sq-ft casino, a 60,000-sq-ft spa and a 3,200-seat performing-arts center. Other components include retail shops, convention space and restaurants. Las Vegas-based Turnberry West Construction is the general contractor, with Bergman Walls & Associates Ltd., Las Vegas, as architect-of-record.

Tony Illia Fontainebleau is flying forms fast.

The project’s 737-ft-tall, 3.4-million-sq-ft, cast-in-place hotel tower uses four tower cranes for its vertical erection, including two Linden Comansa 21LC550 model flat-top modular tower cranes, one with a 130-ft-long jib and the other with a 164-ft-long jib. The Terex-Comedil CTL series makes up the other two luffing-boom tower cranes, one at 196 ft long, the other at 144 ft long. The C-shaped tower, which has 51,500-sq-ft average floor plates, is rising at an impressive rate of a floor every five days. Colsanti Specialty Services Inc., Macomb, Mich., and Ceco Concrete Construction LLC, Tempe, Ariz., are the concrete contractors.

“If you can’t do a floor a week, you shouldn’t be in Vegas,” says Claude Truldeau, vice president of Atlas Construction Supply, San Diego, providing Fontainebleau’s concrete formwork and shoring. “Cost is a factor, but schedule ...