Across two decades of building a coast-to-coast precast and prestressed plant network, Oldcastle Precast has acquired market-leading or niche operators, most often maintaining management but retooling properties or subjecting them to extreme makeovers. Where markets and plant siting have warranted, the company has more recently started to build capacity from scratch.

A new facility resting on a 100-acre site in Edgewood, Md., represents Oldcastle Precast's largest new development to date, and the one of the biggest ticket investments that its parent company, Dublin-based CRH Plc, has made for a North American greenfield project. Adding to Edgewood's initial cost and milestone aspect is a European-styled portal crane, likely the first of its kind in a concrete operation this side of the Atlantic.

The Edgewood plant is located just north of Baltimore near the Atlantic Coast's main artery, Interstate 95, and on land bordering the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground. An anchor facility for Oldcastle Precast's Building Systems Division, it has 110,000 sq. ft. under roof, with production divided between prestressed hollow core (six 500-ft. beds) and wet cast panel (four varying length beds) lines.

“The Baltimore-Washington D.C. corridor does not have a lot of land available, but is a good location for the market — southern Virginia to New York City — we are looking to cover,” notes Chris Pastorius, vice president and general manager. “The business potential in the mid-Atlantic market for our Building Systems Division supports the major commitment we have here to hollow core production and a new value-added panel product.”

With 10,000 sq. ft./day production capability, Edgewood is the premier outlet for CarbonCast, a branded product Oldcastle Precast and five partners in a Lancaster, Pa., venture, Altus Group, unveiled earlier this year. CarbonCast uses self-consolidating concrete mixes and proprietary C-Grid carbon-fiber reinforcement to streamline the mass of concrete — typically in a double-wythe sandwich panel — and confine steel reinforcement to vertical conditions.

Oldcastle Precast developed CarbonCast with C-Grid supplier, TechFab LLC of Anderson, S.C. It elected to roll out the product nationally by enlisting a handful of key independent and multi-plant precast/prestressed operators, plus a marketing staff, to form Altus Group. Edgewood, which began production in summer 2003, is farthest along in CarbonCast panel fabrication and market development, shipping upwards of 300,000 sq. ft. of the product thus far.

Edgewood is one of the two Oldcastle Precast plants chartering Altus Group, although sister plants across the country have CarbonCast fabricating capability. Opposite the beds turning out carbon-fiber and conventionally reinforced wet cast panels is one of the largest hollow core lines built during the industry's latest wave of plank capacity expansion. The Edgewood plant greatly improves Oldcastle Precast's hollow core offerings from a mid-Atlantic operation. The property is an outgrowth of the two-plant Strescon Industries business that Oldcastle Precast acquired in 2000. Strescon's hollow core capacity was confined to a Flexicore (2-ft.-wide plank) line in Odenton, Md. The other former Strescon plant, in Curtis Bay, Md., specializes in structural products.

The Strescon platform has enabled Oldcastle Precast to extend to the heart of the mid-Atlantic market the successful model it has enjoyed in New York, where plants in Manchester and South Bethlehem supply much hollow core and structural product to New York and New England jobs. The New York properties and sister operations in Massachusetts have helped drive the company's Building Systems Division, promoting full structural and architectural packages for low- to mid-rise jobs.