Island Temple Foundation Pour
Press Release

Front Page The Garden Island
Sunday August, 29 1999
Kapaa, Hawaii, USA By BRANDON SPRAGUE Staff Writer
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WAILUA--It is all unusual mix--construction workers in hard hats coming together with swamis in saffron robes for the pouring of the concrete foundation of the Kaua'i Hindu Monastery's new temple.

As workers pour the cement at the temple site which overlooks a meandering section of the Wailua River, monks chant ancient Sanskrit prayers at the nearby yagasala. or place of sacrifice, under the shade of a banyan tree.

Another truck arrives, one of the 57 deliveries of cement that day necessary to make the pour continuous. At the yagasala, a member of the monastery rings a large gong seven times in welcome as the truck rumbles past.

This paradoxical mixture of modern technology and ancient Hindu practices comes together in a different way. in the cement foundation itself. The spiritual leader of the monastery, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami--also known informally as Gurudeva--wanted to ensure that once built the new temple would remain standing through the next Millennium.

But when the monks approached engineers and structural designers with the request they were told it was technically impossible.

"What we got back was concrete is spec'd for only 50 years -- that's the maximum, even if you are building a dam, a bridge or it 100-story skyscraper," says Acharya Palaniswami, Gurudeva's second successor and editor-in-chief of Hinduism Today, the international magazine published at the monastery.

Even ultra-modern support rods like epoxy rebars used to strengthen concrete only add 10 or so years of design life to a structure, experts say.

Then the monks came in contact with P. Kumar Mehta, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, who has been working on new types of long-lasting concrete and looking for someone willing to build a structure using his formulas.

For both parties, it was a perfect match of spirit and breakthrough technology.

Both the professor and the monks, think having the concrete structure last 1,000 years is significant, if for slightly different reasons.

Mehta says that by using building materials which are durable, society will become more economically and technologically stable.

"We have been developing for the last 100 years a culture of much more haste and fast scheduling and profits," says Mehta.

The focus, he says, is on having cement that hardens quickly since the faster it hardens the faster the construction crew can get to the next job and turn a greater profit.

But Mehta says quicker drying cement is more brittle and liable to crack.

And steel rebars to reinforce the concrete structures actually backfire since they rust, he adds.

"Structures designed for 50 years have been falling apart in 10 years or 20 years," he says. "In the U.S., we have 500,000 concrete bridge decks which need repair because of corrosion of steel."

While structure integrity of concrete structures here are weak, buildings in developing countries, which try to emulate the U.S., are even less durable due to improper curing techniques and lack of proper engineering.

Many poorly engineered buildings collapsed in a devastating earthquake this month in Turkey, crushing or trapping tens of thousands of people.

Much of Mehta's research has been centered around encouraging underdeveloped countries to upgrade their concrete technologies.

Mehta says that on the other hand materials used to build structures in Roman Italy and ancient Egypt are still extant because they were durable.

"And we've more or less lost that technology because we have ignored it," he says.

The monks, meanwhile, draw a social and spiritual parallel to the technically durable foundation of the temple.

"Our idea of 1,000 years is that society and individual communities should be building themselves, their people, their structures, their systems to last also and it's also true that people are not doing that anymore," says Palaniswami.

He cites the old village system in India where the justice, educational and banking systems were long-lasting.

"I think it's Gurudeva's wish to be an example of stretching the current concept of short-term living and short-term ideas and reinventing yourself and your community every few years. What he wants us to be is a group that is as sustainable as this concrete pad is sustainable."

Without the people working the temple centuries from now, Palaniswami says, the structure even if it lasts 100,000 years, "will be in a hau bush for us, like Angkor Wat."

Mehta developed and tested the special mixture of concrete for the temple before coming to Kaua'i to supervise the pouring of the foundation, which occurred over the last two weeks.

He incorporates a waste byproduct of coal called fly ash in the mixture, which can be added as a concrete substitute.

Fly ash, which collects in smokestacks of factories, comes from mineral impurities in the coal.

Adding it to the cement for the foundation, gives the mixture much more strength, volume and cohesiveness.

"This is the first structure of its kind and if it works it's going to show the way for the rest of the world," Mehta says of the temple foundation.

"Kaua'i is going to show the way as a pioneering new concrete technology which is needed by the rest of the world."

Mehta likens the fly ash mixture to an artificial granite block.

He advised the monks not to use any rebar enforcing rods in the foundation because "granite in nature doesn't come reinforced with steel."

He says the ancient Inca temples in Machu Picchu have lasted for centuries due to the fact their foundations are 100,000-ton massive blocks.

"Even in severe earthquake areas where there are thousands of people who lose their lives, nothing will happen (to these temples) because they are held by gravity," he says.

"And that's what's going to happen here."

Mehta says that to his knowledge he doesn't know of any other real structure which is "124-feet long, 60-feet wide and four feet thick with 2,000 tons of concrete in it, without a single joint and single support or steel rebar in it."

The monks, who are having the stone temple superstructure handcarved in Bangalore, India, have resisted the urge to use any modem tools or materials in creating the temple.

The $16-million temple, which is projected to be finished in 2010, will be shipped huge stone block by stone block--3,000 in all--to the island, a feat which Sadhaka Thondunatha the monk in charge of fundraising for the new temple, says is like "building a pyramid in Egypt and shipping it to Kaua'i."

The monks took two years just to build the village in Bangalore to house the temple builders.

For the last nine years, 77 families of workers have been painstakingly chipping away at the stone blocks. It can take a carver six months to finish one block, Thondunatha says.

"We have a famous saying in our tradition, no hurry, no worry, no sorry," he adds.

Prof. Mehta would certainly like the construction industry to abide by this saying.

He says that for every ton of Portland cement produced, one ton of carbon dioxide is released into the environment.

"So in terms of global warming, Portland cement industry is responsible for 8 percent of the total carbon dioxide loading in the world," he says.

Despite these environmental concerns the cement industry is actually speeding up production.

Over the next 25 years the cement requirement will leap to two billion tons a year, an increase of half a million tons used currently.

"If we start producing that much Portland cement you can imagine how many storms every year we are going to get because of global warming." he says. By adding chemical admixtures such as fly ash to cement, the Portland cement production can be stabilized, Mehta says.

He says that federal guidelines require some projects to include fly ash and other waste by-products in the cement mixtures, but most fly ash is stockpiled or landfilled by the power plants that create them.

Mehta estimates that in the U.S. there are 70 million tons of fly ash while in China there is over 300 million tons.

"Right now, out of 500 million tons worldwide, only 50 million is being used, so we still have 450 million tons which can be used to reduce Portland concrete production from 1.5 million tons to 1 million tons," he says.

At the same time, safely sinking the toxic fly ash in concrete is like killing two birds with one stone.

Mehta, himself a Hindu, drew from Hindu mythology in his book Concrete Microstructure, Proper ties, and Materials.

In the story, the gods decided to drain the oceans in search of a pot of nectar which supposedly lay at the bottom.

In the process a whole stream of poison was released. Siva was alone among the gods who volunteered to rid the world of the poison.

In the same way, Mehta believes concrete can do in the modern world the same as Siva did in mythological times: swallow poison and bury it safely within it.

Portland cement is able to incorporate safely millions of tons of fly ash, slag and other waste by-products which contain toxic metals.

"Is concrete the Lord Siva of the construction materials' world?" he, asks.

The technology to use fly ash in concrete was developed 10 years ago, but Mehta says everyone from the ready-mix cement companies' to structural engineers to planning commissions have been reluctant to use it.

He says that the whole building process is standardized and so resistant to change that "any deviation from the standard which slows them down and requires thinking, they don't want to do that."

He credits the monks and the open-mindedness of the people on Kaua'i for being the first place to allow the special cement.

"I have not even designed so far concrete mixes even for a driveway. No one has asked me," he says, adding that this temple foundation is the culmination of his professional dream.

"We have straightjacketed technology made it so autocratic that there's no freedom for human beings to think and innovate. We don't use our common sense at all. That's what I'm fighting for, common sense," Mehta, who is donating his services for the foundation project, says.

For Gurudeva, the temple too is, the culmination of a vision he had 24 years ago -- he forsaw the temple standing, overlooking the, Wailua River.

"This temple ... we see lasting many, many lifetimes. Many of you will be coming back to this temple in the future," said Acharya Ceyonswami, Gurudeva's third successor.