Sunday, August 10, 2014

Hauling a Building... A Big Building to it's Final Resting Place

The other day I got dispatched a job to go to "such and such" a site in Waltham Massachusetts to pick up my load.   In this flat-bed work if it says "site" on the address that usually means it is a construction site, and I would most likely be picking up a piece of equipment that is no longer needed on the site.  But on this particular occasion when I got to the site it was a demolition site where they were tearing down a five story commercial building so that some new monstrosity could be built in it's place.  There were seven or eight other of our trucks there and after talking with the job superintendent I discovered that we had been hauling pieces of this building out of this site for several weeks now.  It seems that there were some environmental concerns that the old construction materials in this building may have asbestos in them so the whole thing had to be hauled off to a toxic waste site in Ohio.  Here's a shot of what the building looked like when I arrived.



When it was my turn to get in line to be loaded some laborers on the site came over and rolled out some heavy plastic sheeting on the bed of my trailer and others proceeded to load some large ten foot wide concrete sections on my truck - that makes it an oversize load.



Then after it was all loaded they wrapped the plastic completely around the load and sealed all the joints with glue - this was a tedious task, but they had some sort of environmental consultant team there overseeing their every move so it all had to be done just right.



After that was all taken care of then I had to secure and tarp the whole thing after which I was handed my "oversize" permits and my manifest papers.  Then someone from the environmental consultant group came over and put three stickers on my tarp's sides and back declaring what possible dangers might be lurking underneath those protective layers - I'm not sure what that was all about unless maybe some of the people on the highways might decide they shouldn't be cruising along beside me, or at least they might want to hold there breath until they got past me or something.



Every day is a new adventure doing this and you just never know what may be involved in your next load.  Because this was a permitted "oversize" load I could not drive at night, which made the load take longer than a normal load, but there is extra pay for that situation so it all comes out in the wash.   I actually meant to get a shot of the dump site and show you the final resting place of this building after it's demise, but I completely forgot to do that because I was all excited about my next load that I would be picking up in Talmadge, Ohio.  It has a little more than 2,000 miles on it and delivers to Phoenix, Arizona.  Woo-Hoo!  Here I go!

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