By Irwin Rapoport – CEG Correspondent

Excerpt from Construction Equipment Guide article:

Construction on the new $130 million events venue/arena for the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center (RPCC), future home of the Monument in Rapid City, S.D., began last November when crews from Mortenson Construction and its local partner, Scull Construction Services Inc., started work on the 225,960-sq.-ft. facility that will be connected to the Civic Center that serves a wide area of the Dakotas and neighboring Midwest states.

"The mass excavation and structural fill for the site has been completed," said Dave Richardson, Mortenson's senior project manager. "The project is a sizable export where we hauled off large amount of native soil and brought in a fair amount of structural fill," said Richardson. "There is no basement level — it's basically slab-on-grade construction. The event level itself will be on the slab and then there is the concourse level and premium level topping off the footprint of the project.

"We started driving the production piles for the deep foundation in January," he added. "Right now, we're tracking to a substantial completion of the end of September 2021 with the final completion on December 29 of that year. We are on schedule. For the 2020 build cycle, key milestones were starting the concrete precast activities in late spring for the elevator and stair cores. All of that was in preparation for the installation of structural steel for the arena, which began in May, with the stadia precast following. All of this is leading up to the placement of the roof trusses for the arena. With the roof trusses spanning the structure, the placement of these items will be a significant accomplishment for the construction team. We are anticipating these to be fully set early in 2021."

Read the full article here.