Don't Try This At Home
by
David South, Jr.
Reprint from the 1998 Spring Roundup
In our last issue, Gary Clark, our Vice President in charge of production and training, got to do something that most men only dream of - humiliate their boss. It is now my pleasure to turn the tables and tell a small tale about Gary.
Hold
That Hose - Carefully! We were working on a dome in Eugene, Oregon.
It was a medium sized dome with only a modest crew. Gary and I were both
on the crew, I was about sixteen at the time (I won't say how old Gary
was).
It was the end of a hard day spraying shotcrete and we were cleaning the hoses. It is important to thoroughly clean the concrete hoses every time they are used. If you don't, the concrete builds up inside the hose - similar to cholesterol building up in a blood vessel.
We would start by removing the nozzle from the end of the hose and it would be soaked in a bucket of water. Then we would pump water through the concrete pump and down the hoses. This would remove most of the concrete in the hoses. The hose would be disconnected from the pump.
A special
adapter is attached at the nozzle end so we can force compressed air down
the hose, "blowing" the water from it. It can be a fairly violent process.
Someone needs to literally sit on the other end of the hose to keep it
from flopping around and possibly hurting someone. The process is very
quick, too.
Gary was the closest to the end of the hose so we asked him to hold it.
He went over and picked it up off the ground and held it, standing up, between his two hands. He had done this before. He knew better than that. Everyone on the crew knew better than that. But there he was, holding the hose high above the ground and saying he was ready.
I looked over to Mike who was ready by the air compressor. He looked at Gary then back to me, shrugged his shoulders, and gave a blast of compressed air. For an instant the hose shuddered, then it leaped back at Gary, throwing him off balance. He leaned forward to keep from toppling over, but he lost his hold on the hose and it slid back, down his body, and onto the ground. The water - laced with small aggregate - sprayed up Gary's whole body while on its way down.
Gary said that for nearly two months, whenever he blew his nose, little pieces of sand would come out.
To Catch A Tennis Ball After you clean the hose of most of the water, you want to clean it a little more by putting a "rabbit" down the hose. The "rabbit" is usually a water soaked shirt that is placed in the concrete hose and blown through.
This can be a lot of fun because the "rabbit" becomes a kind of cannon ball. The person sitting on the hose end usually tries to find the best trajectory to make it go as far as possible. While on a job near Houston, Texas, the crew discovered that after the "rabbit" was shot through, the hose was clean and already set up to do something that was even more fun. If the boss had known about it, he would have fired them on the spot.
They had discovered that the concrete hose was just large enough for a tennis ball. So, after the "rabbit" was shot, they would load a tennis ball and blast it out of the hose, too.
I was a 15-year-old at the time, so I was an enthusiastic participant in this endeavor.
One day the crew aimed the tennis ball so it would clear a neighboring, unoccupied, two story office building.
They fired.
It easily cleared that building even though it was a considerable distance
from our site. I immediately ran to see if I could retrieve the ball.
I ran from the dome, across a couple hundred yards of grass, and over
the empty parking lot. As I ran around the last corner of the office building,
I found a teenager lying flat on the ground alongside a bicycle. He looked
very surprised.
I ran over to him and helped him get up. He immediately asked, "Who threw that ball!" We talked for a while and he told me what happened. He was riding his bike around the parking lot on the other side of the building from our dome. He said that he looked up and saw a tennis ball coming over the building. Naturally he assumed that someone had thrown it over from the other side.
He decided
he would try to catch it. Of course, the ball wasn't coming from a height
of 30 feet or so-as if someone had thrown it, but it came from a height
of 200 feet or more. It's velocity was so much more that it zipped passed
his waiting hands, struck him square in the chest, and knocked him right
of his bike.
The boy, the bike, and the ball were all okay.
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