Flagpole installation inBirmingham, AL

Flagpoles in Birmingham

Alabama's medical and banking centre, laid out along a narrow valley between two ridges. We cover Birmingham and the Jefferson County area, including downtown and the Civil Rights District, Five Points South, Highland Park, Lakeview, Railroad Park and Regions Field, the UAB medical campus, Sloss Furnaces, Vulcan up on Red Mountain and the US 280 office corridor.

Wind here. Birmingham sits in a ridge-and-valley urban area, which works out to roughly 110 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. Birmingham sits in Jones Valley with Red Mountain along one side of it, and the limestone under that valley is the first question on any job here. It dissolves. Cavities open in it, sometimes under ground that looks perfectly ordinary at the surface, so we would rather prove a spot than assume it, and a hole that runs soft gets looked at before any concrete is ordered. Downtown is the second question: between the taller blocks the wind at street level behaves nothing like the printed figure, so we size for what the buildings do rather than for what the map says. Exterior work in a local historic district, and in the commercial revitalization districts, goes to the city's Design Review Committee for a certificate of appropriateness before a permit follows. A fair number of downtown and UAB addresses are slab or structured deck rather than open ground, which turns the footing into a designed detail and moves the price of the job before the pole is even chosen.

Most of the people who call us from Birmingham are hospital and medical campuses, downtown offices and hotels, banks and law firms, churches, private schools, funeral homes and industrial frontage along the valley floor.