1986 Restoration of the
Cochise County Courthouse
Original Architect: Roy
Place
Bisbee,
Arizona
The original precast concrete facade had used iron rebar as reinforcement within the castings. This iron armature rusted as water made ingress into the castings via the numerous small checks and cracks that had accumulated over time due to the facades' lack of maintenance.
Iron Oxide can expand up to 10 times the size of the parent metal. Because of this, the rusting rebar expanded and forced the concrete to fragment and literally dropped a large section of the facade on the courthouse steps. Fortunately, no one had reason to bring a lawsuit in this case!
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This instability was resolved by using 18" x 1/2" threaded stainless steel rods, core drilled into the poured concrete walls of the courthouse and injected with epoxy.
In response to this condition, our current rebar armatures are now coated with a special epoxy coating to prevent oxidation of the steel.
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The salvageable fragments of the facade were epoxied back into their respective positions and the missing areas were recreated by sculpting a matching concrete and polymer admixture identical in texture and pigment to the original.
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