Colorado Quality Assurance Supervisor
Prides Herself on Service, Never Stops Learning
20 September/October 2019 The Conveyor | www.martinmarietta.com
Quality Assurance
Supervisor Carly
Paige poses
during a tour of
the Quivas Ready
Mix Plant.
Cylinders of concrete are
left to cure in controlled
conditions at the Quivas
Lab. They’ll later be
intentionally cracked to
test their strength and
durability.
create for our customers or the specialty
designs we’ve created in the past that
our customers request when they return
with new projects,” she says. “We also do
designs for our Northern and Southern
ready mix groups, so, in total, we’re
offering about 500-600 active designs.”
Paige says the 300 mix designs commonly
requested in Denver Metro can
be created using chemical admixtures,
cement, water, air and eight types of
coarse, intermediate and fine aggregates.
Factor in that those ingredients themselves
come in hundreds of varieties,
however, and the math becomes
mind-boggling.
Paige and others in the field can create
products to meet specific performance
The machine’s growl is constant as the pressure builds. The numbers move
higher and higher and she stands, smiling; she’s seen this many times
before. The rumbling continues and echoes off the walls. Unfazed, she
continues to smile. Then – without pause to the machine’s guttural hum –
a sudden POP!
“Cool,” she says.
The concrete has cracked.
It’s a single beam – one of hundreds Quality Assurance Supervisor Carly
Paige and her team test annually. At a glance, it’s an easy process: make a test
batch of concrete, let it cure, apply pressure until it cracks, record the results.
But Paige didn’t earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry and a Master
of Science degree in Systems Engineering to spend her career performing easy
tests. This job, she says, requires so much more.
While there are smaller labs in the Rocky Mountain Division, Paige is
anchored at the Quivas Lab, one of Martin Marietta’s two full-scale American
Association of State Highway and Transportation R18-accredited testing
facilities. The other accredited facility is located in Garner, North Carolina,
which means Quivas takes in a substantial portion of all quality testing west
of the Mississippi River.
While much of her time is spent batching and testing ready mixed concrete
designs, Paige also works with aggregates. It’s no exaggeration to say that the
science of testing these products – particularly concrete – is intense.
“Here in Denver Metro, we have 11 ready mixed concrete plants that offer
about 300 active mix designs and that’s not counting the specialty designs we
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