Don'T Mess Around.....

[redrum]

With The Demolition Man!

Any of you guys want to hear some of my stories from when I used to wreck buildings?

I did it for almost 20 years and worked as a laborer.

There's excitement, humor, danger, injuries and death involved.

Let me know and I'll tell some tales of the wrecking ball.

Gotta go for now though. Back tomorrow.

[zepyep]

Hi all,

redrum,..................Go for it! demo is awesome

KB

[redrum]

Alright! For my audience of one.

I started out wrecking things back in 1977 after a short stint in the Teamsters as a warehouse worker. When the company I worked for went out of business I left the Teamsters. This was also around the time that Jimmy Hoffa dissappeared.

I'd been out of work for about a year and my friend Vince had started at Cleveland Wrecking Company in San Francisco. He asked me if I wanted to try working there and I said ok even though I didn't know a damned thing about that type of work. My starting pay was $4 an hour!!!

The first job we went to was on 2nd and Harrison in San Francisco. On top of a five story building we had to remove two old steel water tanks that were supported by a big concrete canopy. They wanted it removed because it was causing the whole building to sag and you could actually see the effect on the first floor as the windows were bowing outward. Another guy working with us was named Andy. So we got our jackhammers and chipping guns set up and started to bang away on this thing. It was kind of exciting to break the concrete and we were all pretty much beginners at it. We cut the steel tanks in half with a torch and then cut the top halves into small pieces and we left the bottom open to catch the falling concrete. Well, Andy got this idea that if we just cut the ends away of the big concrete beams and if he 'calculated' right then the whole piece could be dropped right down into the tank. Well, it worked up to the point where once it fell it landed on the tank but then it decided to do a back flip and it rolled right off and punched a big hole right through the roof and dropped all kinds of debris down inside the building on top of a bunch of file cabinets. Needless to say not a good start for me as a demo worker and the building manager came storming up and kicked us all off the job. (But this is why the company has insurance). So the hole had to be patched up before we could continue and about a week later I was sent back (without Vince and Andy) and I got the joyful task of working with a foreman named Bill. Now this was the craziest son of a bitch I've ever met. His claim to fame was yelling and I got an earful of that then and for a few years after whenever I was unfortunate enough to work with the jackass. Anyway, we got the roof cleaned up by calling in a crane to lift all the concrete and steel down into a truck.

In hindsight us three were totally unprepared for a job like that and when I think about it now I would have done it a totally different way, and that includes protection of the roof with heavy plywood and tires to take any shock, and I would have also brought up two Bobcats with rams on them to do the concrete breaking. The bottom half of the steel tanks would have been used as skip pans to load all the debris down to the truck and it would just have been a smoother way to do the job. But you learn these things as you go. I won't do a chronological timeline of my jobs but I'll jump around and tell of the more interesting jobs.

Next will be the old Haight Theater in San Francisco with crazy rock and bottle throwing protesters. I didn't work on the job but my friend Vince did and by this time he was a crane operator with the wrecking ball and he was in the Operating Engineers Union and I was in the Laborer's union and we were both making good bucks. Andy stayed on as a fuel truck driver but wasn't in any union. (He was lazy anyway)

Til next time.

Keep watching the skies.

[beatbo]

i'm an ironworker and that was a kickass story!

more, please...

[redrum]

i'm an ironworker and that was a kickass story!

more, please...

Ahhh...Our old buddies the Ironworkers.

I've got a good story with you guys too (later)

The Haight (Straight) Theater

Now I wasn't on this job but I got the story from my bud Vince.

We used to go to the Haight theater as kids back in the 50's so there was some sentimentality about the place on my part. I also went there a lot when it became the 'Straight' (I never could figure out why they named it that). I saw a lot of bands there during the decline of the Hippie in that area. That was when speed and barbituates began to show up and lots of violence occured. That and the 'Spades' (blacks) started coming around too causing a lot of trouble. I saw about 20 of them beat this one guy on Haight and Masonic. They were just a roving band of thug/assholes. But that was way back then so let's jump to the 80's.

As the company prepared to wreck the theater the word got around the neighborhood and the protests began. Lots of signs, yelling and screaming and once the heavy equipment showed up then the rocks and bottles began to fly at the operators (Vince). I know he wanted to kick some ass but it was pretty much a mob scene with the crazies so he had to stop work for a while at least. He even brought one of his pistols from home and I don't blame him. Well, time is money as they say and the job had to go on despite the protests. The funny part of this is that the theater had been closed for years and was in a state of delapidation by this time and no one seemed to have a plan as to what to do with it. But I personally feel that if any of the old places like this CAN be restored I would be in favor of saving them. But if no one steps up to the plate then the owners have the right to do with it what they will if it's their property. Anyway, as the work to tear it down proceeded the protests continued and they come to find out that there were about half a dozen people now inside the place staging a sit down protest in the balcony. They tried to talk them out and told them that the wrecking ball would soon be put to work. They refused to leave. So the foreman tells Vince to just 'lightly' hit the outside wall with the ball to see if that may convince them to leave. It didn't work. Fed up, the foreman told him to hell with them and let the ball fly as hard as it could. When the ball crashed right through the wall those people couldn't get out of there fast enough. And believe me, I've been inside one building where the wrecking ball was working and it sounds just like a bomb going off as the whole place reverberates. It's scary.

Well, after that there was some scattered protests but the place was eventually demolished and no one on either side got hurt. I'm sure Vince was glad as hell to get off that job and far away from there.

Next I'll tell of the big job we got in Oakland at the phone company and this was work that came after the '89 Loma Prieta earthquake. This was with our 'buddies' the Ironworkers too as they had to build 'The Wall From Hell'.

Til then.

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The '89 Loma Prieta quake. That was scary for sure. A disaster for many but a boon to the construction industry. I know the guy who worked on the Cypress freeway that collapsed in Oakland. He had the job of breaking the concrete away so that they could recover the bodies. Definitely not a fun job. I'd driven on that freeway a lot too. Oakland got it pretty bad because of the shaky ground it sits on. I took a lot of pics of collapsed brick chimneys on a lot of houses.

Well, the big job we got in downtown Oakland was the Pac bell phone building. It was actually 2 buildings next to each other (one old, one new) and they were 15 stories tall. There were two demolition companies working there (that was pretty rare) Cleveland Wrecking and ICONCO from Oakland. Iconco had to take of all of the building's facade to expose the concrete wall. I worked for Iconco on some jobs too and I knew most of the guys there so that was pretty cool. But that was a tough job in itself removing the facade. As they did that we had to come in and expose the beam and column joints so that the Ironworkers could beef them up and then they covered them with new concrete. Well, the walls on the building were 18 INCHES THICK and just breaking a hole through with was a monumental effort. We had to do 350 of them. Every little bit of concrete had to be removed from the joints too and that included all around the nuts and bolts that held them together. That was just part of the job as we had to do a lot of breaking in the basement and rough up huge sections of the outside wall so that they could ad another 8 inches to the outside surface. This place could withstand a nuclear bomb. But since it's the phone company it has to be that way to keep communications up. I worked there for 2 years straight without a break and we did lots of overtime on top of that. The money was rolling in. There was also a 12 story building across the way that we had to tear down completely. It was full of wire that had to be removed first and there was TONS of it. A fun part of that job was that the elevator cars were stopped on the 12th floor and we had to get them out of the way as we used the elevator shaft to dump the debris down to the second floor and it was loaded out to the trucks. So the elevators had to be cut free to drop freefall to the basement. I was on the first floor when they were dropped to keep anyone away during the drop. And believe me, when they fell it was like a tornado/bomb when they hit the bottom.

It was awesome!!

So once we dropped them we had to build a steel plate 'catch bin' on the second floor that would catch all the falling debris. We used 5/8th inch thick steel plates and mounted I beams underneath them for strength. It worked out well. At the beginning though we had a problem or two. The company had hired an independant welder to come out and weld all the seams of the plates together. But the Ironworkers on the job didn't appreciate this even though they had nothing to do with that building. On a Friday one of the Ironworkers had asked me if we had a 'welder' on the job and I said yeah, but i thought he meant a welding machine. But he was talking about the guy doing the work. Well, I didn't think anything about it until the next Monday. My friend John (he was the foreman) had his own personal welder inside the building and when I went in that morning to hook up the leads to his machine I noticed that the spark plug wires were missing. I thn noticed that someone had removed the oil filler cap and dumped in all kinds of dirt and debris right down into the engine. I hesitated to tell John because he has quite a temper but I had to give him the bad news. He was actually pretty calm about it but he knew that the Ironworkers had done it. So he went to them and told them that if he didn't find out who did it by noon that he was going to cut the Ironworkers off our air supply that they had been using throughout the job. We called the lead man of the Ironworkers 'The Rooster' because he was always complaining about the noise we made (couldn't be helped) and he about had a shit fit when John threatened to take their air away. I myself am pretty sure who ruined his welder but we never really found out and their company (Romak Steel) had to buy him a new engine. But it was pretty chickenshit what they did nonetheless. Some of them are real assholes and they carry unionism to an extreme. We also had to deal with them putting up 'Ironworkers For Clinton' stickers all over the job.

Anyway, that job took a total of 6 years to complete and John made the company a million dollars profit. But it was also the job where I injured my back and it was the beginning of the end of my stint as a laborer.

Next time I'll tell about a big job me and John did for ICONCO next and it was a bad luck job with one death and a freak accident.

Til next time.

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Oh my aching thumb!!

One time we were doing a job just off Broadway in San Francisco. We had to get a Bobcat into the ground floor to dig out some dirt and I was given the task of breaking out a bunch of bricks around the doorway so that the machine could get inside. Well, I'm banging away with the 30 lb. jackhammer and was gripping it with my left hand with my thumb right there on top of the jackhammer. All of a sudden a loose brick drops and landed right on my thumb. I swear that was the worst pain I've ever felt and it went on for about 20 agonizing minutes. Needless to say I was done for the day (and the job) and eventually lost the thumbnail.

That was an interesting job because it was featured in a Dirty Harry movie (I think it was 'The Enforcer') where Clint was chasing this dude and they ran right into the doorway of this place and up the old rickety stairs.

On another job I sort of did the same thing to the same thumb. I was hammering a hole in the floor right next to a concrete wall and the point of the gun got stuck in the rebar. As I tried to yank and wiggle it back and forth to free it I smashed my thumb between the gun and the wall. Criminy!!! Another nail bites the dust. More agony and pain and I was off for 2 weeks with that one.

Your poor old hands take quite a beating in that line of work and injuries were pretty common. Death is another matter and I'll tell that story when I get back. The only things I really miss about that work is my friends and the money.

[redrum]

The Crocker Bank Job

This was a job we did in San Francisco on Post and Montgomery Sts. We had to remove 10 floors of office space that was on top of the bank. After removal they made a nice garden space on top of the bank for lunch or lounging around. It took us almost a year to do the job. We started fairly late in the year and it was already pretty cold. The scaffold had to be covered with plywood so that rock chips wouldn't fly off and do any damage. But we did manage to break some windows of a nice galleria that was directly down below. Luckily they had 2 panes of glass so that only one had to be replaced. After a while I considered this to be a bad luck job. A storm had come in over the weekend and we got a call that the wind was ripping the plywood off and it was flying off the building (from 12 stories up). So we had to go down on a Saturday and reinforce it. Later we come to hear that one piece had blown off, went about one block in the air and hit a security guard right in the back of the neck. He was lucky he wasn't killed and was always showing us pics of his wounds and I'm sure he sued eveyone and their Mother. More power to him I said. But to me that was a bad omen.

In December I was a couple floors down from the roof hooking up a water pump and hoses for dust control when my friend John comes running down the steps yelling that there was a guy hurt bad on the roof. He kept going down the stairs and I went up to the roof to see what had happened and it was a horrible sight to say the least and I really don't like to think about it even now after 20 years. John had cut a concrete covered beam that had to weigh tons and when it dropped it landed on one of the young guys working there. To this day I can't understand why he was under there as there was caution tape flagging off the area and I can only figure that he was taking a short cut to get onto the roof. Well, when I saw the kid his brother was holding him in his arms and we all knew he was almost dead. I tried to console the brother. Of course the job came to a halt and when the coroner showed up he was so damned non-chalant about it and that really pissed me off. Anyway, they wrapped his body and we sent it down with the crane. We were all in shock for quite a while and my friend John left the job for some time before returning to work. He told me he'd made his peace with God about it and we never talked about it again after that and haven't to this day.

But despite this bad beginning this was a good job to be on and there's more to tell with some good humor too.

Back soon.

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Continuing the Crocker Bank job.

After the disaster of that December day things settled down to normal on the job and I was eventually put on the scaffold full time with a crew and we had to keep covering the scaffold with plywood to keep debris from from getting away. One day a new guy came on the job and he was put with us. After a while he confessed that he was afraid of heights and I told him that if he really was then he shouldn't be in this line of work. The building had one corner that was rounded and it was hard to totally seal off the scaffold in certain spots where there were small openings. But we had to improvise and just used small pieces of carpet to do the job. Well, the new guy was with us and he had his hammer out and he accidentally dropped it an I'll be damned if it didn't fall right through one of the small holes and I watched it fall 12 floors and it landed right on top of the sidewalk baricade with a resounding BOOM!!! People down below were scrambling to get out from underneath to look up and see what was happening. They couldn't see me that far up and I couldn't help chuckling a little bit because the barricade had done it's job of protecting the pedestrians. I didn't mention the hammer falling to anyone and when the guy went down to get it he just kept walking and I never saw him again. A wise decision on his part especially being afraid of heights. As the building came down we also had to dismantle the scaffold and stack it to send it down with the tower crane and back to the company. I'll be back later to tell about dumping a load of brick and debris down to the street. That was a 'fun' day too.

[redrum]

Man, I forgot all about this thread.

Well, let me keep going and tell the story of the 'Terra Cotta And Brick Rainy Day'

I had just returned to the job after being off with the flu and the foreman Bob sent me down to the street to stop traffic and back the trucks into our loading area. Well, that was on Post & Market Streets in San Francisco and when you put up a stop sign to try to get people to stop for a big truck and they see a green light they're going to miss then many of them get real pissed off at you and make all kinds of threats. But most were all talk and would never get out of their cars anyways so I'd just ignore them. We were permitted by the city anyway and all I'd have to do is call a cop if they really got out of hand. San Francisco drivers are a bunch of fuckers anyway.

Anyway, my first day back and I got one of the trucks backed in to load. We had a steel chute angled down from the mezzanine that the trucks sat under. It was a noisy sumbitch too when those first few buckets of debris came down from that height and hit the steel bottom of the truck bed. I grew to hate it and was never without my earplugs. But the pedestrians and people who sat across the street for lunch had to listen to it and I felt sorry for them because we had to load even through lunch because the truckers were too expensive to delay. After I got this one guys truck ready he shut his engine off and I figured we were ready to go as it was pretty much routine. I had a walkie talkie and told the guys upstairs to go ahead and start loading. Right after I said that the truck driver started his truck and for some damned reason he started to back up. When I saw this I got on the horn to tell them not to load but too late....Down came a bucketful of bricks and debris and it all landed right on top of the trucks cab and fuel tanks and most of it went into the street and hit about 6 cars that were driving by. Luckily, no one was hurt. But I couldn't believe it and it being my first day back I thought for sure I'd get canned. The truck driver was freaking out yelling we had no communication and I asked why he'd backed up and blah, blah, blah, as the blame got passed around. So I got on the horn to Bob and told him what happened and he told me to look up and I saw him peeking out of around the 7th floor window and he said he wasn't coming down but would send one of our secretary's to get all the info for insurance purposes and we also had to clean up the frikkin' mess which totally stopped the traffic. It's always funny in hindsight but at the time it was a pretty scary disaster. I just wish I'd been sick one more day.

[jabe]

What a cool thread redrum! I missed it before so thanks for reviving it. That's some interesting reading.

[spidersandsnakes]

Some cool working man stories here:)....keep on

[redrum]

I'm going to try to dig up some pics of the Antioch, CA bridge section that was dropped into the river with explosives.

I have some pics but have no way of posting them. Maybe Antioch's Chamber Of Commerce can send me some.

Be back later.

[spidersandsnakes]

I'm going to try to dig up some pics of the Antioch, CA bridge section that was dropped into the river with explosives.

I have some pics but have no way of posting them. Maybe Antioch's Chamber Of Commerce can send me some.

Be back later.

Now that would be rather interesting

[redrum]

Now that would be rather interesting

I sent them a request to see if they have any pics that I can link to. I remember it was a cold sunny day in Feb. '79 and when they blew the span with 40 delayed charges the span dropped into the river shaped like an upside down pyramid. The noise of the explosions made your heart skip a beat too.

[redrum]

Still no reply from Antioch's Chamber Of Commerce. I'll give 'em some more time.