Tag Archives: rebuild

Three Years of Building Progress

One of our earlier visits to Victoria had involved staying close by a building that was being demolished.  They were keeping the façade of the building intact and taking out the interior for rebuilding and development.  Three years has gone by since that visit and I was interested to see how the building was looking.  While some finishing and fit out still appears to be underway, the building appears to be complete.

They have retained the façade as anticipated and constructed a whole new building inside.  In addition, one source of the building had been removed to allow the demolition process to get underway and that now has a new structure grafted on to the building.  Consequently, there is a combination of the old and the modern in the way it is finished off.  I assume by the next time we are in Victoria, it will be open for business.  I don’t know when it was originally scheduled to be done but I assume the pandemic delayed things a little.

Rebuilding the Taxiways at LAX

In recent years, LAX underwent a reconfiguration of the norther runways.  I understand this was partly to accommodate the A380 operations which, when initially introduced, created some restrictions on other operations as a result of the runway spacing.  They respaced the runways.  I wondered whether any of the aerial photos I had taken at LAX showed the differences that had been made.

My first flight was during the reconfiguration process.  The change to one of the runways had already been made and could be seen in the spare surface were the original northerly edge had been.  Other work was underway around the thresholds and in the underrun.  The photos from later show the finished configuration.  The threshold of the inner runway has been moved from its original location and the underrun work is now complete.  Things like runways feel like they should be so permanent but, as with any man made construction, they can be taken apart and rebuilt if that is what is needed.

Restoring Lower Wacker

One of the parts of the city that most tourists never get to see is Lower Wacker Drive. Wacker Drive is the road that runs around the Loop along the line of the river. It is on two levels with Upper Wacker being normal street level and Lower Wacker sits directly beneath it. Half of Lower Wacker was rebuilt before we moved to the city but the other half was in an unrestored state for many years. If you watched the first of the Christian Bale Batman movies, you will have seen Lower Wacker in all of its darkness. (Go further back and the Blues Brothers movie also provided a tour of this area in the final car chase.)

I like Lower Wacker as it provides a bypass to get to the Eisenhower Expressway while avoiding the worst of the traffic – at least it did. Then they closed it for a progressive rebuilding program. This has been going on for a couple of years and is now about to be concluded. I have not been paying a lot of attention to the rebuild but I have taken a look whenever I have been passing by. The work has been a rolling program gradually moving down the length of the road. A section has been closed off while everything was diverted around it. Then the whole process would shift a few blocks further south. When I was up on the top of the Sears, I had a great view of the bottom of the drive from above. It was clear that everything was nearly done. Now I get to wait until I first can drive the new road. I have heard they have calmed the traffic flow down there which is probably a good idea but a little disappointing!

Offline for a bit!

If you are a a regular reader of this blog (and thank you if that is the case) I owe you an apology.  I have had a bit of a gap in my postings.  There are a couple of reasons.  First I have been tied up with a couple of other things that have meant I wasn’t always able to get back to writing something.

However, the bigger problem was that my desktop started to show signs of impending death.  The OS must have been corrupted somehow and so a reinstall was called for.  Never had to do that before and trashing the system to start again was a bit nerve wracking.  Of course, it didn’t go totally smoothly but, courtesy of some good backups I got most things back up and running.

I also took the chance to think about what I really needed on the machine.  Yahoo! Messenger has not made it back on.  When do i ever use that these days?  The priority was getting the most important stuff back up and running so writing blog posts was relegated.  However, things seem to be back to normal (mostly) so hopefully I will be a bit more reliable in future.