How Proactive Maintenance Reduces Costs, Extends Parking Garage Service Life

Owners and property managers often find it difficult to fund and make necessary repairs at their parking structure facilities, typically because these facilities don’t generate enough revenue to pay for maintenance and repairs. However, deferred maintenance and/or repair of parking structures, particularly those in cold-weather regions, always ends up costing more than proactive maintenance and prompt repairs to correct or prevent deterioration of the structure.

In an effort to keep repair costs low, owners and property managers often enlist their regular building maintenance staff to identify and repair deterioration without guidance from an experienced structural engineer. This approach almost always results in repairs that do not have an adequate service life, which exacerbates the initial deteriorated conditions, causing the damage to spread more quickly throughout the structure.

Furthermore, when owners and property managers lack sufficient funding to address structural deterioration, they face greater costs down the road due to increases in material and labor costs, and the likelihood of that the existing deteriorated condition will expand into a much larger area.

Photo #1: Remaining Deteriorated Concrete Slab and Metal Deck and Corroded Steel Support Beams

It is common to see owners and property managers “kick the can down the road” by installing shoring to maintain the safety of their parking facility, even though they understand that the repair costs will be much higher in the future and that the cost of installing the shoring will not offset or reduce the repair costs in the future. An example of this type of approach is provided in Photos #2 and #3.

Photo #2: Aluminum Shoring Beam at Unsafe Precast Slab

When owners and property managers completely ignore maintenance and repairs over a long period of time, the condition of the structure becomes unsafe to use, resulting in the conditions shown in Photos #4 and #5.

Photo #4 below shows the shoring posts which were installed to prevent the collapse of a cast-in-place reinforced concrete framing system from the early 1970s after a structural engineer determined the facility was unsafe.

Photo #4: Shoring Posts at Unsafe 1970s Cast in Place Reinforced Concrete Framing System

Photo #5 shows shoring posts installed to prevent the collapse of a precast concrete framing system that was not much more than 15 years old. Unfortunately, the same parking structure was determined to be deteriorated beyond repair and as a result, because it was a below-grade facility located beneath an existing 12-story building, it had to be demolished and replaced at great expense.

Photo #5: Shoring Posts at Cracked and Failed Precast Beams and Slab.

In the case of the precast garage shown in Photo #5, once the owner saw the results of a complete lack of maintenance and ongoing repairs at one of his garages, he took proactive steps at another precast garage that was beginning to exhibit similar deterioration. As a result, the second garage was repaired and properly maintained as shown in Photo #6.

Photo #6: Properly Repaired and Maintained Precast Parking Garage

As illustrated in the photos #1 through #5, the deterioration of a parking structure is often accelerated by the effects of weather, snow removal, deicing salts, and vehicular traffic. As a result, timely repairs and proactive maintenance are critical to maintaining the intended service life of a parking structure as illustrated in Photo #6.

The relationship between the deterioration of a structure, the application of proactive maintenance and repairs, and costs, and the duration of the service life is illustrated in Figure A below:

Figure A

Points A1 and A2 in Figure A represent the early and ongoing application of proactive maintenance and repairs for a parking structure. This approach of maintaining a parking structure reduces the costs and frequency of repairs while at the same time extending the service life of the facility.

Point B1 represents deferred or reactionary maintenance and repairs, which provides marginal improvement at greater cost while not extending the service life of the structure to its originally intended duration, which is typically ±50 year. Point B2 represents a scenario in which portions of structure might need to be taken out of service to install shoring in order to provide stopgap repairs of rapidly deteriorating conditions and or to maintain safe access to the facility.

As a result, and as illustrated in Figure A, the most effective application of repair costs must occur early in the life of a parking structure in order to achieve the maximum service life of the facility at the least cost. Unfortunately, as shown in Photos #1 through #5 above, this approach to extending the service life at reduced costs of repairs for parking structures is not a path chosen by owners and property managers very often.

The structural engineers at Partner Engineering & Science have extensive experience assessing, repairing, and maintaining parking structures. We help owners and property managers avoid the situations illustrated in Photos #1 through #5. We offer structural assessments of existing parking structures to determine the cause of deterioration as well as the best, most cost-effective approach to repairing damage and extending the service life of the facility. Click here to download our Maintenance Checklist, designed to help owners and property managers complete and track an ongoing proactive maintenance and repair program.