The Group That’s Crafting First-class Façades

By Evelyn Witterholt. 

WTI’s façade group is working hard to ensure that Medxcel facilities’ façades are in tip-top shape. 

Keeping the façade of a building in good condition is crucial for aesthetic and safety reasons. That’s why Weatherproofing Technologies Incorporated (WTI) has a whole façade team dedicated to maintaining this element of buildings across the nation. We recently got to speak with Michael Gnatt, a façade foreman from WTI, about their team and what kinds of façade safety innovations they are currently making. 

Michael works with his façade team specifically on Medxcel facilities in the South and Midwest. Their group has a few technicians who go to various hospitals and buildings to repair their façades throughout the year. They also have a crew that focuses solely on parking garages, replacing the concrete, sealant and membranes using Tremco products.  

Façade projects typically take an average of four months to complete with 10 to 12 people per job. Michael told us that their team is a well-oiled machine of technicians who don’t let anything slip through the cracks. “You have to make sure that their day is moving forward and make sure all your materials and your safety equipment are all aligned, and make sure that the guys are doing their task,” he said. 

With safety being a number-one priority for WTI, many of their project innovations have to do with safe workplace practices. One major safety concern is silicon dust that can get into workers’ lungs while grinding the concrete. Michael says that Tremco provides full-face respirators that help keep all the dust and debris away from workers’ eyes and lungs. They also have ways of cutting back on clouds of dust while grinding concrete. 

“Back in the day, you'd see a guy cutting concrete and you'd see clouds of dust around him. We use what is called a vacuum setup now,” Michael said. “All of our tools, meaning grinders, drills, hammers, it's all hooked up to vacuums now. So we catch 98% of the dust that goes into the air now.” 

Recently, their team installed a new membrane system on a Medxcel parking garage in Jacksonville, Florida. This job required them to grind a pre-existing, 20-year-old membrane down to virgin concrete and perform major concrete repairs. Then, they applied Tremco’s Vulkem® membrane and painted new lines for parking spaces.   

“The outcome from the beginning to the end was phenomenal,” Michael said. “They're (Medxcel) ecstatic with all the work that's been completed so far.”