From the Scene: June 1, 2008
by Bill McNew, ASHRAE video consultant, DSG Productions

The work site looked strangely empty. There were plenty of cars in the lot and workmen were easily seen up on the scaffolding and going in and out the entrance to the building, but something was amiss.

As I pulled my camera from the bag and donned my trusty hardhat, I looked over toward the corner of the construction trailer; the location from which I always take my first shot. The paunchy white single-wide was gone. Like a missing tooth on a six-year-old, the visual void was huge. In its place loomed a huge mound of dirt being worried to and fro by a couple of yellow behemoths spouting exhaust and clanking away like a couple of Main Battle Tanks.

Final grading work has begun on the parking lot.

Outside the building a complete skeleton of aluminum scaffolding memorializes the progress on the new soffits. This is a massive undertaking and the use of scaffolding rather than lifts makes it at least feasible. I ventured up for a look from the precarious vantage point of the workers. Not good. Old age and an abundance of caution make me a poor candidate for high steel work…or high any kind of work, for that matter. I imagined the wind whistling through the cross members as I inched along; sure death beckoning a thousand feet below. Then I came upon the first group welding the new substructure in place. Their cavalier approach to what I sensed was sudden death was, to say the least, sobering, if not humiliating. I retreated to the now- air-conditioned second floor. My kind of space!

Everything is proceeding in a chain-link fashion…this before that, then that, then that. Hugh told me the carpet on the second floor might be laid as soon as next week, a milestone akin to topping out on a from-the-ground-up job. We spent a brief interlude planning the party.

As I was leaving, lunch time arrived and I inserted myself into a group gathered on the first floor. The subject of conversation soon shifted from work to the Senate hearings involving the oil executives and the environmental impact of ethanol production, particularly in the Amazon Basin. As I slipped away, I made a note to myself: come prepared next time.