ive been working at the CAlgary International Airport, on the new expansion and Came in this morning, and noticed that all the sod that was just laid was 'moved' by the folks at Air Canada. not only did they move the sod, they moved the topsoil as well. I did a double take when i saw it, laughed my butt off. there was a lot of work done there, a building was moved in, we buit and paved the lot, and inside the building. another company did the landscaping and sod and it looked really good, till this morning just wondering if any one else has had something like this. (yesterday there was an Airbus A330 getting some engine work there. guess they did a run up on it.)
Looks like they should have had someone hold a sheet of ply behind the engines to deflect the air...lol
I don't have any pictures, but that's not to bad. I worked for a company many years ago that had to do an engine run at full power for something like 30 minutes. No engine test stand, no deflectors, etc. so they parked the airplane in a convient spot and tied it down. The engine exhaust cut ditches in the dirt, blew the dirt across the street they were backed up to and into the housing development on the other side of the road. The police got lots of calls and finally showed up at the company, but by the time they got ahold of management they were done with the engine run.
All the time! We have to grade to 2cm and then underground comes to dig it all up and pile their stuff all over the place. Makes me rage when the inspector is complaining about a little bump that we have to fix so underground can move in.
All the time! I'm a mechanic
i hear that, or someone forgets that they have to run a line for sprinklers, car plugs or something else underground, usually thourgh your finished crush. can never seem to get it back the same way.
It used to happen with one contractor I wrk with the irragation guy told he had to come after topsoil was spread. N he run his lines n leave humps all through finish grade last time he want me to come back n fix it.I told him no n have irragation guy do it cause I already had it power raked. He had to do it I use a clay loam topsoil. So now I grade to sprinklers or he rests them if they r to high or low.
Get it all the times on commericial buildings. Backfill the building foot print, grade it out nice than along come the plumbers and electricians with thier below floor stuff and rip the snot out of it. That's okay though. They never put it back together and lots of times I get paid to do it again.
Every single day (blading county rock roads) between the feed trucks' hog haulers' and the oversized farming equipment we can't keep up so we call it job security.
Heheheheh. I've thought about this a lot. I get a road all dressed up and someone comes along and destroys it. Why can't those people not drive on my roads and tear them up?? Can't they see how much work I put into fixing all this?? :tong Then reality hits me and I realize I only have a job because of those same people driving on my roads. No vehicles, no grader job. I still hate the trash trucks though!!!!
Yes, but its usually me. Finished the bottom arena pad 5 times one winter. It was the perfect wheeling spot. After a heavy rain would come it would have just the right, consistency to really fling some good old fashion American mud. No big deal just fire up the skip loader and blade it back down to grade. Once the sand was in and the fences were up we had to move to the back 40. Needless to say we got stuck alot more often back there.
I don't like to take time off from work because of that reason. I work for the county and in the spring i pull shoulders and get a nice new crown for the summer, but the forman will put someone in my blade at times if he dont have anything for them to do and then my fun starts all over. They seem to make a 2" cut at the shoulder that likes to hold water and on the other side leave a apx 6" windrow in the grass that now is well off the road as well as in driveways.
Once upon a time we were doing a landcape cleanup job on an expensive lake place after all the construction and irrigation had been done. The owner was one of those cheap millionaire types and didn't want to spend 18-20 a yard for screened black dirt so we had a guy bring in some lower grade stuff for about 10, had alot of peat mixed in it. The job was done after the harbor was finished and that contractor didn't get done till the end of september, so when we got done it was october. When we left the irrigation guys had a little left to do and the owner was going to have it hydro seeded. The owner had a a polaris ranger he was letting subs used, turns out the irrigation guys hit a tree with it then parked it in the garage like nothing happened, so we got a call wanting to know if we'd done it. (fortunatly we hadn't used it) The irrigation guys said they didn't do it, but the funny thing was it was fine when we pulled out. After that we sent the final bill and instead of getting a check about a month later got a nasty letter about the quality of work we had done and this and that and we weren't getting paid till it was done right. Keep in mind when we left it was looking good and we saved the guy about 15 grand on his black dirt. Went to the site and discovered 2 things happened. The hydro seeding didn't catch cause it was done so late in the year, and areas he said were not properly leveled and holding water were areas the irrigation guys hat gone through after we left and either not raked out again or rutted up with their trenchers and plows and not fixed. Talked to the guy on the phone, couldn't reason with him and had to wait till the next spring. Went out and looked at it again for the 4th time,he didn't want any equipment of any kind used on his lawn so what he wanted us to do was use his bobcat (Which he'd just bought) and his ranger to black dirt the areas that were rough. Rather than try to argue the point that our work had been done and they had come in and messed it up I just went out there with one of our guys and spent a half day moving black dirt by loading the ranger with the bobcat and spreading it by hand. Took about 5 hours and most of it was the pain in the @$$ of moving black dirt 200 yards a bucket at a time with a polaris ranger. The other irony was he ordered about 20 yards of black dirt from the landscaper that hydroseeded the place and paid about 25 bucks a yard and it wasn't any better than the stuff we had gotten him for 10. Agrivating as heck, but it was easier to put the 5 hours in than go through court to get paid. Karma has a way of working out though, he may have gotten a deal on his landscaping but we had another side line with one of this companies and refused to do business with them after the incident. Turned out they couldn't find anyone else capable of the service so after a 400% markup we continued to work with them.
I've had more problems with the owner doing stupid things than others, we did a tiling job once and fought it the entire way, wettest job I've ever been on and ended up doing a lot with an excavator and laying it by hand and it was so wet we had a hard time keeping the tile in alignment, a total disaster and had it partially backfilled and it was working and at the perticular moment when the landowner stopped to talk to me my excavator and dozer were burried up to the top of the tracks and my trencer was in up to the center of the hood and sinking and we were tring to get them out. He stops and asks about where it was wet and how long to stay off of it and since it was costing him a lot of money he didn't want to do anything to destroy or cause harm to our work, I tell him not to drive "anything" on the area for about a week and when he can drive his pickup over it without getting stuck to then give it a try. Now I'm telling him this as he's on his way out to spread a load of manure on another field and he's got about a 500 bushel box spreader pulled with 250hp front wheel assist tractor, the whole rig weighs in over 25 ton and its massive maybe more and he tells me not to worry he'd avoid that field for over a week. When he gets into his cab my wife asks me[she had been helping me the whole while] if I thought he'd actually do that or drive along side our tile and get stuck, I told her he'd never make it anywhere near out tile and not to worry, she went onto say I'll bet you 10 bucks he drives along side our lines and gets stuck, ok its a bet. So we watch as he pulls away from us swings over to our unfilled tile line and drops the tractor tires and spreader tandems on the one side of the rig INTO the unfilled tile line ditch and proceeds to spread manure and drive right down our newly laid tile line. I"m in total shock and as I watch him do this my wife starts to laugh hysterically and gets things back under control by the time he's headed back to the buildings and I jump into a pickup and head him off and confront him as to what he'd just done and bacsically chew his ass for being so stupid and tell him he'd just crushed our line and totally destroyed our work, after a few moments of silence I asked him why after I'd told him to stay out of there did he do it, his reply was "I forgot" and he said he'd pay the bill even if it didn't work. I was beyond pissed when I walked back to my wife [who was still laughing] and told her to shut up and I didn't want to hear about it and all she said was [I told you so] and you owe me 10 bucks. I told her no he drove on our line not beside it and I didn't have to pull him out and she then said "how did he even do that" we can't walk there and he spread manure there, our excavator is buried and so is our dozer and and trencher and he just pulled that through where we are stuck. I told her god looks out for the stupid. So we had to go back and do the entire job the second time. The next time the owners wife came out and talked to us and she promised to not let her husband out on that side of the farm for at least a week so he didn't do it again. I asked her why he did it and she said she was the machine operator and he was the livestock person and she never should have let him out with her tractor in the first place and wanted to know how upset I was, I kinda told her and she said "at least you didn't walk out like the last three contractors did." Well we did the job twice and she paid both bills. I've done some work for them since and every time the wife makes all the arrangements and tells me she'll keep her husband at the buildings until I give her the go ahead and its safe to let him out.
At the landfill I asked dad for some grader time. We had another guy out there that had worked with dad over the years. He had spens some time blading haul roads. Every thing I did he would go over even if mine was right. One particular thing that burnt my tail he would run tell some buddies at the coffee shop how bad I was on a grader. Being I d only spent a few hour on one. THe thing that got me was one day I coverd a finished lift. I finished it with the D5 and then the little grader. He came down and and got o nthe grader while I was gone to lunch and drug up a bunch of pare and left it.
Thats funny
We did another job a few years back for a guy who wanted trees taken out along a creek and we had just got it done and landscaped and seeded and the seeding was coming up and I'd gotten paid and was back to look at it and a crew was busy working seeding trees along were we had taken them out and I went to ask the owner what was up and he told me the government office had convinced him to plant trees back in there and they'd pay him to idle the land for ten years. Now being more than slightly confused I asked him why he'd paid me to take them all out if he was just going to plant them all back and he said it's no big deal the governemt came out with a new program and thats just how life worked, so I asked him how much the governemt was paying him over the next ten years and he told me and I told him thats nice it was half of what he just paid me to take them out and the next time I did it I was charging him more so that way he'd think twice before doing it again. My crew just laughed and thought it was the governments way to create new jobs and spread wealth around, he pays me to take them out the governemt pays him half the cost to put them back and in ten years I'll get to do it again for even more money, my wife just told to let it go his check is cashed and the money was spent and its called "job security" and I'm sitting there thinking HUH you've gotta be kiddding me that makes no sense at all.
Not much of a concern in demolition.
I'd never looked at it like that before, but you make an excellent point, provided you demolish the right building.
One thing sticks in my mind that happened to me years ago. We were building a 2 mile stretch of road which consisted of grubbing, ditching, and graveling. The dozer did the grubbing and heavy cuts, bullpens the material and when he finished I made the finishing cuts with the grader. I worked very hard on the ditches and they looked really good when finished. I was very proud of the job that I did. Next step was to place a foot of gravel on the road. The gravel was very course with alot of rocks. What I would do is after levelling weed the rocks out and windrow them to the side. The plan was to let the road pack down for awhile, then come back and windrow the rocks to the center, scoop them up with the loader and haul them away. I took a couple days vacation and the spare operator was on the grader. He was sent up to grade the rest of this road. He decided that he didn't like the windrow of rocks so he put the grader in 5th gear or so and flung all the rocks back into my finished ditch. What a hell of a mess, as there was rocks all over my fore slopes and back slopes:Banghead I figured he must have been flying. I had to go back and haul them all out again. I was fit to be tied. Anyway, we loaded all the rocks and hauled them away, but what a pain in the butt it was to gather them all up again...