The Squamidian Report – June 30 / 07

 

Issue #266

 

Also in this issue:

The Ontarion

 

Hi All,

 

Every once in a while you (I) get to do something at work that is a bit different, or interesting, or might even be fun if it weren’t at work dong work. Well, while Brian Lang is busy up there on the beautiful Lake Huron shores building a motel, I was given the assignment to demolish a motel. There was an old run down motel near the south end of town by the Mamquam Blind Channel, just below the bluffs in kind of a swampy area. For whatever reason, probably the value of the land and the deplorable condition of the structures, the owners decided to have it torn down and the site cleaned up. They didn’t even bother to remove the furniture or other contents, which could all go as demolition debris.

 

So in I went with the John Deer 200 excavator, one of our mid size machines. It is incredibly easy to just reach in through the front wall of a unit and grab the contents with the 5 ft cleanup bucket. Our machines all have hydraulic thumbs so grabbing is easy. The stuff that would come out would give anyone the creeps. If it were a bucket of bed, it would be yellow stained and grungy. If it was other furniture is would be grungy. If I pulled out the carpeting, it would be so dusty and dirty that I could hardly see it. The excavator has air conditioning that delivers filtered air and keeps the cab pressurized so I was protected from the dust and dirt. Everything went into 40 yd dumpsters and I ended up loading 2 of them about 10 times each with the building and the contents, creating 20 loads of garbage.

 

It’s quite easy to knock down an old building, you just poke in a few corners and then put some pressure on the roof. Down she comes into a pile. Then you walk the machine up onto the pile and work your way along, collapsing the units as you go. Once everything is down, you walk the machine back and forth, turning a bit as you go. This crunches and munches the lumber and sheet materials up a bit. The smooth cutting edge of the bucket makes a great guillotine for severing beams. Just bring it down from about 20 ft up and it will go through almost anything. No need to worry about dropping into a basement, buildings in the low sections of town don’t have them, they would just fill up with water if they did.

 

Once the whole things is just a dusty flattened heap of debris, you just work your way along loading it into the bins, one bucket at a time. Often you have to break some of it up a bit more but generally its just a mater of bighting a bucket full and swinging it over. The debris needs to be placed fairly carefully into the bins. As much material as possible has to be loaded in because of the cost of trucking the bins, and the bins have to be loaded level with no debris protruding above the top. So it takes a bit of care to get then loaded properly as you swing from up on top of a spongy pile of motel. Because of all the insulation and other dust sources, I had to stop about every 3 hours or so to clean the pre-filter screens in front of the radiator and oil coolers. These screens would do their job and collect a thick layer of dust and then the hydraulics would start to overheat. No big deal, just something that had to be dealt with. Once the entire motel was loaded out, there was about 6 or 8 loads of concrete footings to pull up out of the mud, break up and load onto dump trucks. Smooth off the site and job done, no more dilapidated motel.

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Bears are about as commonplace around here as raccoons or squirrels are in many major cities. Just the other morning I happened to look up as I was checking over the machine I would be running that day and saw a young black bear walking down the middle of the street. He was too old to be a cub, to young to be a full grown adult. Kind of a teen age bear, clumsy and unsure of himself. He didn’t like the machine and went down a driveway, only to come back out when a dog barked and headed into a different back yard.

 

Anyway, bears are even more numerous in Whistler. Maybe they find the tourists easy pickings, who knows. There was a soccer game happening and it was being filmed. Part way through the game a big full-grown black bear came lumbering out of the bushes and grabbed the soccer ball. He played with it for a while, batting it around with his paws. Then he sat down and started to chew on the ball, which went flat of course. He picked up the flattened ball and carried it off into the bushes as he left. Must have thought playing with a ball looked like fun. The whole thing was caught on film and made the evening TV news.

 

doug

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THE ONTARION REPORT

 

Hello everyone!

 

I’m not sure what’s going on but we seem to be having a perfect summer here in Ontario. I guess maybe Ontario’s weather man is just thumbing his nose at his counterpart in BC. LOL! Things have really been screwy across the country this spring and so far this summer. The prairies are getting their share of tornados and the folks in BC are getting soaked every time they step out the door or so it seems. While in the east they are suffering from fog and colder temps than they would like. For the sake of Sus’s reunion plans for the Brubacher clan I hope the weather improves by then. We’ve had a few smog days here but for the most part the sun has been out most days and what rain we’ve gotten hasn’t been a great deal. In fact we could use a little more to green things up again. Our lawn is about half brown and half green at the moment. I think it’s gone dormant because of all the heat we’ve had. They say lawns don’t die in this kind of weather but kind of go into hibernation like wild animals. I guess that means it’ll come back green with the next good soaking from Mother Nature. Let’s hope so!

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I just heard the weather report for the Canada Day weekend and it sounds great, sunny and not too hot over the next four days. They say we’ll be seeing temps of 21 to 24c each day and that’s just fine with me. Good weather for cruising in the MG or taking a bike ride in the country side. Waterloo has just celebrated its 50th or is it it’s 150th birthday and are planning a huge fireworks display at Columbia Lake on Sunday (Canada Day). I think we may just head up to watch the action this year. They attract quite a large crowd every year to this event and this year should be no different. I think it starts in early afternoon and runs until shortly after ten pm so you can get there anytime in between and not miss anything. We used to set off our own fire crackers but people don’t seem to do that anymore. I guess it’s just as well since they’re a dangerous item anyway. Let’s hope that this year’s celebrations go off without anybody getting injured from the fireworks.

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Here’s wishing all of you a Happy Canada Day weekend!

 

That’s about it for this week. Thanks for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you all again next time in The Ontarion Report!

 

Bye for now.. Greg.

 

PS: Something To Think About>

Does anyone know what year the electric trolley’s stopped running up and down King St in Kitchener/Waterloo?

 

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The Family and the Squamidian sites:

http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b/ and http://www.thedougsite.ca

Have a good one..

the doug

 

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