Decrepit Old Fool

It’s a common amazing urban sight: men and women up on scaffolding in cold, wet weather laying bricks, applying siding, fixing roofs, doing and repairing construction.  I’m not separately afraid of height, of cold, or of wind, but together it’s a combination I would only attempt under the most extreme duress.  How do they do it, day after day?  Next time you’re tempted to complain about the weather while you go from car to office…

I hope it doesn’t bother them but I sometimes watch, fascinated by their skill.  When heavy machines are involved, it seems as if they could pull the tab on a pop can with a giant excavator, so perfect is their mastery of the medium.  They are working with tons of suspended weight, as delicately as a cat walking on a railing.

Yesterday, Christmas day, a suspended, cast concrete facade slipped off a column of a building on campus.  It fell downward about eight inches, hit the ground and buckled in the middle, coming to rest wedged between the building and the column’s steel core.  Someone saw it and called the fire department.  Finding tons of concrete precariously suspended next to an office building, the fire department contacted Stark Excavation.

A careful plan was devised and one of their most experienced operators (30 years) set about bringing down the column.  From the pictures it looked as though the plan was to pull the column to the North using a heavy excavator.  Probably the arm of the excavator was strapped to the column with the idea of letting it down gently.  But something went wrong and a column segment came down on the machine, killing its operator. 

Imagine the impact of this event at Stark Excavating.  It’s not a big company, and this person had been there for thirty years, operating their biggest equipment. Some Christmas for the employees and their families.

Yet today when I walked to the site, there were Stark employees, putting the column facade sections on a flatbed.  They’d already secured the other columns with heavy straps.  It’s an icy cold, windy day.  Most construction sites are full of voices and shouting, but the area was quiet and somber.  They were doing their jobs.

NOTES:

• Pantagraph story: Equipment operator killed while trying to remove column at Hovey Hall.  Be sure to check out the photo gallery. 

• Pantagraph story, with details about the accident: Hovey hall accident victim identified
• In the Pantagraph photo gallery, Dr. Bowman’s face pretty much says it all.  There are an awful lot of buildings on campus whose foundations were dug by Stark.
• Here’s a 3d model of Hovey hall
• These huge facades appear to have been connected to the steel columns by welded flanges at intervals on the columns.  The building is 40 years old. 
• I’ve always been fascinated by structural collapses.  I’m struck by the responsibility that architects and engineers have when they design systems to hold heavy objects up in the air.  When the systems are built (struts, beams, flanges, bolts, etc.) they are storing energy which hopefully will never be released by accident.  That energy storage system must account for static and dynamic loads, fatigue, expansion and contraction, and even corrosion.  If it fails, there should be a redundant load path to ground.  Where none exists, catastrophic failure is possible.