The Construction Thread

I did an afternoon shift in the basement of a Wall Street high rise that got flooded in the superstorm. As the foreman was showing me where our gangbox was, about 5 levels below the street, he said "they had 10 feet of water in the lobby here and all this was totally underwater". As soon as he said that I stopped, got my respirator out of my bag and put it on.

I figure a couple trillion gallons of seawater swept out every basement, subcellar, sidewalk vault, manhole, abandoned fuel tank, boiler room, sewer, storm drain, rathole and shithole from there to the Jersey Shore and it was all floating around in the air down there.

The foreman is one of those redfaced Irish drunks who doesn't wear gloves and usually scoffs at any sissy stuff, but he saw me put my mask on, got his out, and neither of us took them off the whole day.

Some hillbilly outfit from the Deep South had the cleanup contract there. A bunch of white company dualies with Alabama and Florida plates and a bunch of people who looked like Lynyrd Skynyrd roadies running the show. They'd hired about a hundred mutts seemingly off some streetcorner in one of the outer boros and put them in Tyvek suits and bootees swabbing down every exposed surface with sponge and bucket. I''ve never seen so many people crammed into one jobsite before. It was like trying to work in Grand Central Station at rush hour.

They had all the fireproofing off the steel and they were washing EVERYTHING...even the underside of the Q deck. Every pipe, conduit, beam, hanger....everything. I don't know why they didn't have about 100 power washers down there. Everything was being done by hand.
 
Cheap Labor in Greenland from China. $14/hour plus room and board, it's the new workers paradise!

The fuckers are doing the same thing here, except they talked our government into it by saying we didn't have trained people so they have to bring them from China, the mine disaster capitol of the world.

It will be 5 years before they can start training Canadians and 14 before the first one starts a full time job
 
The fuckers are doing the same thing here, except they talked our government into it by saying we didn't have trained people so they have to bring them from China, the mine disaster capitol of the world.

It will be 5 years before they can start training Canadians and 14 before the first one starts a full time job

With the big projects coming on in the eastern Canadian Arctic, you DON'T have people in Canada to do the work. You should be out procreating!
 
You know what I am going to do when I have an ironworker to love?

In the middle of the night I am going to climb up on those beams when everyone is sleeping and spray paint: I LOVE YOU! on them.

Do you think he will know it was me?

I hope not, cause then he will know I am fucking crazy.
 
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