This article is an excerpt from Episode 6 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring industry veteran Jack Whitworth. The Injection Connection is hosted by Jim Spiegel: Vice President of Alchemy-Spetec and Board Member at the International Concrete Repair Institute. (If you'd rather listen, an audio version of this exchange is posted at the bottom of the article.)
Jim Spiegel: I think you and I have talked at some industry events and some networking events about the fact that it really serves us, even though we're competitors, to have a unified message of how work is done. Having the same recommendations, so to speak, would do all of us more of a service to work together than to try to work apart. Not everyone has the field reps that really know what they're talking about. I know there are a lot of great chemical grouting people out there, but you could probably count on both hands the real good ones. I think you would probably agree with that. We need to work together and educate as well as we can on that grouting committee.
Jack Whitworth: Correct.
Jim: And those meetings are great because it's all the heads of the industry so to speak trying to work towards a unified goal. But of the things we struggle with in that committee is the whole marketing side of things. You have your SLVs, your LVs, you have your semi-rigid, your semi-flex, there are all these ways you can skin a product. How do you view that as far as how some people might refer to as an SLV versus an LV? You know how it is, different companies will just say, “Oh yeah, you need an SLV, here you go.” What's your opinion on that as far as nomenclature and some of the confusion?
Jack: I think a lot of the confusion starts with an earlier comment you made: “if all of the grout manufacturers could work together”. One of the biggest issues we have is the ASTM guidelines. It not only affects the commercial industrial side… If they're going in the tunnel projects, there's just this unknown of what can be utilized under certain conditions. It’s the message that we have to send, a clear concise message to the engineering and the design community and the contractors. One of the most important things that I like to strive on is - what are the points you need to consider in selecting a grout? As you know, there's no silver bullet to stop water infiltration or stabilize the soil. I think that the more education there is, and the more fluid we all are together in spreading that communication, the more we’re actually going to help the business grow. We look at where new buildings are being built, they might be old moss lands or water bearing areas where they've filled it in. There are areas and locations where we never imagined a building would sit. These are, as you know, great opportunities for us in the chemical grouting side of things. We see a lot of misadvised materials, I guess you would say, being utilized. I believe in what we call an assessing type of practice to where there are a lot of questions that need to be asked before we throw an answer out like, “use an LV or SLV.” It could consist of questions such as - what's the method that we can use to actually get the grout there long enough to set up? What are the substrate types and conditions because, as you know, all substrate types could require a different type of grout. What is the pH of the water source? What's the nature of the crack? Is it a moving crack? Those are going to be things that we need to have answers for. And things like - what's your water flow in the source of your water? Those become very important questions. And I think how we've hurt the industry a lot of times is that people have lived by the silver bullet theory rather than trying to spread a good consistent message.
Jim: Yeah, I would agree completely.
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