29-April-99 Construction Lesson

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I got more than I bargained for when I packed my camera along this morning. It's been a while since I updated you on the Rogers Street Bridge construction, so I stopped off there to take another picture. Last tuesday the workmen were wiring together reinforcing rods sticking up on the sides of the roadway, and today there were plywood forms around them. I rode all the way up to the fence and started to take a picture, when one of the construction guys asked if I'd like him to take a picture from inside the site where he couldn't allow me without a hard hat. He took a couple of pictures, and then came back and started to talk. It seems that he must be the site supervisor, because he had to be in charge of a concrete pour later today. Those forms I mentioned a moment ago are for the parapet walls (now you know what they're called) along the sides of the bridge, and besides the forms there are several small tubes, maybe the size of a coffee can, for test samples of the concrete. “Back in, I guess the 60's,” the guy said, “there was a building going up,”

I knew what he was talking about. “Yeah, over on Commonwealth Ave in Brighton,”

“You remember that. It was extremely cold weather, and the concrete hadn't cured, and people were killed when the building collapsed.” Part of this guy's job is making sure they have those samples of the pour to see that it cures properly. After people get killed when it's not done right, they take that pretty seriously.

But besides that, he seemed to want to vent a little to a member of the public about how some mishaps can come about the he and his crew aren't really responsible for. He can't be in two places at once, even if he sometimes has more than one site to oversee, and he wanted to let me know about a geyser he had once had to deal with. On one job there was a water main going over the bridge that was being replaced, and the guy from the city water department told the construction crew to go ahead and take out the water main. I think you have all the information you need at this point; there were valves on each side of the segment that was going to be demolished that were supposed to be shut, but either they weren't, or they didn't work properly.

“It's a good thing that the kid running the backhoe on the demolition work didn't just swing the thing to break the main,” he said. “There's this thing called a DynaBit that goes on a backhoe -- well, look over here, here's one -- [it's kind of a jackhammer attachment that replaces the trenching shovel] and it'll break up anything. It'll break up all creation. The guy doing the demo” [sic! That's not what we mean by “demo” where I work!] “used one of those to punch a hole in the water main, and the water wasn't off! We had water going thirty feet in the air, I swear, higher than that telephone pole, all colors of the rainbow. I mean, it was a sunny day and you could see a rainbow in the spray. Well, if you know what you're doing, you don't just go ahead and break a water main like that. Someone has a power drill, and you take a 3/8 inch bit and bore a hole in the pipe to make sure there's no pressure. If there is, it's not a big problem. You can almost fix it with [taking a wad of gum out of his mouth to make the point] chewing gum. When you have a hole the size we had, you can still fix it. They have these sleeves you put around the pipe back from the break, slide into place, and clamp down. The guys from the city water department got out their raincoats and did that.”