Anchors Away!

Contractors sometimes take an extraordinary short-term view of their obligations.

At one plant EPR evaluated the owner's engineer had agreed to waive the contract requirement that all embeds were to be hot dip galvanized. The back-story is that the contractor managed to get late on anchor bolt delivery and wanted to skip the delay associated with galvanizing. It is also worth noting that this location was in a polluted location, in a hot humid region, on the sea. This simply means corrosion concerns are very serious.

The photographs were taken before the first unit even reached first fire. Already, the anchor bolts exhibit heavy corrosion and loss of substrate material at the threads.

Within a couple years of COD, it is conservative to expect the anchor bolts to be essentially non-existent. It's not clear how the foundations and structure will resist uplift forces without compromise and risk to the structure.

The "fix" at that time was to add galvanized nuts on top of the previously un-galvanized nuts. Sort of...