Masonry Magazine July 2005 Page. 29
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As a mason contractor, how many nights have you laid awake at 3 a.m. with the wind blowing against your bedroom window? You can't sleep because you know you have masonry walls up that may not be braced, and you are wondering if the wind will blow any of these walls over. You hope that your foremen have properly braced these walls, but you haven't been enforcing them to do so. In fact, the truth of the matter is you haven't taken bracing requirements that seriously until tonight, when the wind is blowing against your window. The next morning, you call your foremen to see if your walls are braced. By now, it is too late. If they weren't braced, chances are you may have lost some walls.
Or maybe you have had an experience like I did just last summer. On a Saturday night during a weekend camping trip, I was sitting around the campfire, drinking beer with some friends, and making plans to play golf the next morning when my mobile phone rang. It was the superintendent at one of the Wal-Marts we were building. He informed me that we had a block wall blow over. Luckily, it blew over when there were no workers onsite, and no one was hurt. So the next morning, instead of going to the golf course, I had to head up to the job site to assess the damage. What a way to ruin a camping trip!
In writing this article, it is my hope that the likeliness of one of your masonry walls falling down will be reduced. And if it does happen to you, that you follow the proper steps so that no one gets injured or killed, and you will get compensated for cleaning up and rebuilding your walls. With that being said, I am going to explain the most critical points of wall bracing, I hope, in simple mason's terms.
The Standard Practice
FOR YEARS, the masonry industry had only the OSHA regulation to follow for wall bracing. The OSHA regulation dictated that "all masonry walls over eight feet in height must be adequately braced." That was it! With this regulation, as long as your walls had some kind of bracing on them and they didn't blow over during construction, you were "adequately" braced. On the other hand, if you were braced for a 40-mph wind and your walls blew over due to a 60-mph wind, your walls were deemed "inadequately" braced. This obviously proved to be quite a gray area of interpretation.
The Mason Contractors Association of America (MCAA) recognized this predicament and formed the Council for Masonry Wall Bracing, a group of masonry experts including contractors, engineers and masonry design professionals. In 1999, the Council introduced the Standard Practice for Bracing Masonry Walls Under Construction, or Standard Practice. This Standard Practice lessens the risk of lost production, loss of money and most importantly, the potential loss of life.
First and foremost, the Standard Practice establishes life safety as its principle goal. From a practical point of view, it recognizes that under some rare circumstances it is impossible to prevent walls under construction from blowing down. So, the Standard Practice does not totally protect from property loss, but it does provide mason contractors with the knowledge on how to prevent injuries due to wall failure.
Secondly, if OSHA were to come on your job site and you were following the Standard Practice, you would most likely not be cited or fined because this is an "industry standard" and, in most cases, OSHA recognizes it.