Car parks and soffits
Chloride arrives on vehicles, water ponds where the falls were never right, and the damage is overhead in an occupied space.
Car parks are their own category of this problem, and there is a reason to treat them with more urgency than balconies: the damage is above people and their cars. Concrete Cancer Brisbane inspects and repairs basement, podium and open-deck parking.
In bayside and riverfront suburbs, cars carry salt in on their bodywork and it washes off onto the deck. That puts chloride on concrete that is nowhere near the water, which surprises committees inland of the bay.
Falls to drainage may have been marginal when built and can be worse after decades of settlement. Standing water sits directly over the top reinforcement and keeps it wet between rain events.
A basement holds humidity, and humidity is one of the two things corrosion needs. An enclosed car park effectively never dries out in a Brisbane summer.
Car park slabs are engineered for economy over long spans, which can mean less cover and more sensitivity to any loss of section.
Spalling from a soffit lands on cars and occasionally on people. Once drumminess is identified over a bay, that bay should be isolated rather than scheduled.
An open top deck is exposed to weather like a balcony and loaded with vehicle-borne chloride like a basement, usually with a thin topping over a long span. Where a building or a centre has one, it is normally the first element to need serious work and the one where deferral costs most.
The practical constraint is almost never the concrete — it is losing parking. Staging by bay or by zone, working overnight, and sequencing so that the minimum number of spaces is out at any time is what makes a car park job liveable. That should be in the scope, priced, rather than negotiated on site once work has started.
The suburbs below cover the 1960s–80s walk-up belt and the bayside strip, where salt air can reach the steel faster.
Tell us what the concrete is doing. We will inspect it and give your committee a written scope and a quote it can actually vote on.
