A War

As winter faded away, we began to improve our production and I added more people to the crew. And so did the customer; Sierra Pacific Power Company. The general contractor, or 'Construction Management' firm had built a small complex of trailers to house themselves, the architect (Black and Veatch) and the customer representatives. These representatives were going to be the Quality Control team to ensure that their building was all that it could be!

At first, there were only 3 rep's on the QC team but it grew. Of course it did. Sierra Pacific was a public utility and they don't know of any other way of doing business, except add more manpower to any project. Which meant another trailer to be added to the 4 that were already there.

And they were a curious bunch, these QC guys. You couldn't do any work at all without finding one of them peering over your shoulder and then quickly consulting their well worn copy of the project specifications.

It was soon obvious that no one on the project was trusted by the QC Team. Bad feelings! As typical construction workers, we banded together with all of the other trades and presented a united front to them. We could wage a specification 'war' as well as they could! And we did.

It took a long session with the architect to resolve our difficulties, but the architect sided with us and spent some time with his customers, explaining how buildings were actually built. Public utilities may know power… but they don't know construction.

The QC Team retreated, war was over and we continued on and back on schedule… for awhile.

More Winter

That winter at the Sierra Pacific site was brutal. Because of the slow start when an underground river was found below the building, we were working up on the steel decks in the middle of January. The ironworkers would get up as much steel as they could on the sunny days and then it was time for us to climb up there and drop hanger wires through the deck before the next sunny day; a day when they would pour concrete if the temperatures were reasonable. So, storms or not, we had to get the wires dropped. Snow and ice was everywhere and we had to move cautiously near the edge. It was only a 4 story building but that still meant a 60' fall from the roof if you slipped on the ice. There were days when I wouldn't let anyone get up on the building and that would put us behind schedule. And that meant we were sometimes back up on the decks when the concrete was being pumped, just trying to stay ahead of the 'mud'.

We had thousands of wires to drop. Each was 12' long and made of #8 galvanized wire with a 'pigtail' loop at one end. This loop had to be positioned just right so that the concrete would flow through the 'pigtail' and hold it. To drop the wires, we first had to layout the pattern of the future ceiling below us by locating the walls. Then we would use a heavily weighted 4' long piece of rebar with a sharpened tip on the end to punch a hole in the deck. With 3 or 4 of us punching on the deck, the noise level grew quite high! While we were dropping the wires, we each carried a bundle of 50 wires on our shoulder and tried to locate the holes and then thread the wire through them.

And when we weren't on the high decks, we were down in the basement, trying to layout and snap chalk lines to locate the walls we would be building. The basement was covered at that time as the concrete had been poured on the first floor level. But, concrete is not waterproof and all that melting snow from the floors above us would slowly trickle down into the basement; dripping on us continually.

I mentioned snapping chalk lines for the walls; because conventional chalk was just floating away in the water and not making a good line, we starting using 'lamp black', a pure carbon form of chalk. It would work right through the water, creating a sharp black line that wouldn't wash away. It also wouldn't wash away from your skin and clothes. We were quite a sight each day as we emerged from the dark and cold basement, bundled in filthy clothes and parkas, our faces black from the chalk.