Good for Some, Bad for Others

The schools weren’t the only things shut down by the Blizzard of 09. The jobsite at Emerson One in Emerson Corporate Commons was too.

We were supposed to have a meeting at the site on Monday afternoon. The prospect canceled on Monday morning. “One of our guys is in a wheelchair,” I was told.

It really didn’t matter. The jobsite was closed anyway.

At this point in time, Emerson One consists of four cinder block stair towers rising out of the foundation. The surrounding site is a stew of mud and trenches. The snow covers all of that now. A wrong step could be extremely regretful.

Since not much else was going on at the office, I decided to drive out to North Laurel anyway. Standing looking at the deserted site it occurred to me that this storm was not good for the workers on this job. Instead of getting in a days labor at one of the rare commercial construction jobs right now, they stayed home.

The jobsite wasn’t completely shut down. Two workers were trudging through the snow and muck trying to clear some of the snow from the site.

A pickup truck from the county Bureau of Engineering rolled up the road so I spent a few moments talking with John Alcorn. He told me that some of his guys had just come off eighteen hour shifts moving the snow. He looked pretty tired himself.

“You get much sleep in the past few days?”

“I got about four hours last night,” he told me.

He said that some guys on his crew logged in over 50 hours of overtime during the storm. He then pointed out that this helped take the sting off the mandated four day county furlough the week after Christmas.

That summed it up nicely. B09…good for some, bad for others.