Pans, Blasts, and Beams: Lessons from the Field

The dirt crew did a few more “pan” jobs back then. A couple of subdivisions for the Leydecker family who originated in West Seneca. One project was located off East and West Road, the other off Freeman Rd in Orchard Park. The lesson learned here was while the Leydeckers were honorable people, their customers were just the opposite. After chasing the money for a few years, Union Concrete became very selective when looking at work for developers.
Hunters Creek Road was another pan job. The section between Route 20A and Route 78 was treacherous to say the least. Narrow and a very steep grade following the natural contour. Our job was maybe 60 thousand yards of embankment to build a gradual grade with new drainage. A local homeowner ended up with a new pond and George got the fill needed. Three Terex double barrel pans were used 2-18 yards and 1-14 yards. The pond was located even higher in elevation than the roadway. Because of this, the haul road was probably steeper than was safe for the scrapers, but since we were going downhill loaded, it sped up production. Who could argue with that logic? The job went off without a hitch, but I’m afraid the Terex people wondered why those rigs had premature brake failure.
Side note – in those days it was common to have scrapers under their own power rather than on lowboys. On this job we drove them from Syracuse to Lancaster for a storage yard job for NYS Electric and Gas, then on to Hunters Creek.
Another project was Eden Evans Center Road from Route 20 to Route 5. Its scope was realignment with a half mile of new locations with a new bridge over Big Sisters Creek. This new section continued onto Beach Road up to Route 5. Beach Road was rebuilt with enclosed drainage and curbs and gutters.
The section East of Beach Road received sanitary sewer up to Route 20. Ecol construction was the sewer and water sub. Paul Gallo and Paul Jr. were the owners. To say Paul Sr. had a knack for aggravating the daylights out of engineers, inspectors, and residents is an understatement. It was so bad that his misdeeds were a line item on weekly progress meetings. He did a substantial amount of blasting on this job and the county engineer was tasked with keeping Paul safe.
When ordered to use blasting mats, Paul purposefully overloaded the charge and blew the mats up into the roadside power lines and turned to the engineer and said, “that’s what happens when you use mats.”
It was around then that George bought a new case excavator. I was excavating the bridge abutments when we encountered rock. George had Paul come down to shoot it. When he was packing the shot, I had my oiler (yes, we had oilers on excavators back then) to signal me when Paul was ready. When I saw Paul drive his car down to provide the twelve-volt power to set off the charge, I told them to wait while I walked the excavator to safety. I could see Paul yelling at the oiler, but he held his ground. When I was ready, I signaled my oiler, and he started running.
Seconds later Paul touched the leads to his battery and promptly got a shower of rocks, which took out the windshield of his car.
Whenever things got a little boring on that job, Paul would do something crazy and give us something to talk about for a while. Regretfully, that was the only job we had Paul on.
A noteworthy job in the era was an emergency bridge repair on 219 in Buffalo Junction over the Allegany River. A loaded dump trailer was heading south and, as has been known to happen, the trailer raised up and hit the first span of the truss structure rendering the bridge impassable.
The DOT put out the repair, which was to demo the existing span and construct a pier halfway across and build a two span precast box beam replacement.
This was an approach span which made it accessible to build it. There was a glitch though. The contractor had thirty days to complete the job subject to some high penalties. It was on this project I realized Brother Gary’s zeal for difficult jobs. He brought it in at twenty-eight days, and from then on, he was hooked. A and B jobs are Gary’s oxygen.