“Happy” D-Day! Of any day, this is one to remember the 400,000+ American servicemen who gave the ultimate sacrifice to literally save the world in WWII and the thousands who died exactly 70 years ago today to make a tiny toe-hold on the European continent. Of course our DC-3/C-47 participated in and supported the D-Day invasion and one or more of the 5 patched bullet holes still in her may very well have come from over the countryside of France…
Back to the present… we have made a little more progress on the hangar renovation in recent weeks. When the FAA renovated our Yakutat Hangar in 1958 and ’59, they corrected a design problem for our particular location – we get more snow than anywhere else these hangars were built. The stepped-down original design caused the snow on the higher hangar bay roof to calve off and crush the office building roof 15 or so feet below it. They extended the roofline of the hangar bay out to the outside, creating a wasted space on the 3rd floor (and future home to my 2-lane bowling alley), but solving the snow crushing problem.
New problems arose with the roof drainage pipes having to be rerouted from the new low spot to the old downspouts. Over the decades, the seals of the segmented cast iron pipes eroded and leaked. All the rot of the movie theater floor was caused by these little drippy leaks, when no one bothered to fix or patch the leaks. On the side of the fly shop, someone at the State did remove the cast pipes and replace them with PVC, but there were still a few leaks here and there. Large portions of the PVC exploded a few years ago (right before we opened the fly shop) and we patched those sections patched as best we could.
The lines dropped down into the hangar bay and poked out the back side of the hangar. When the snow piles up in winter and then turns to rain (which is most of the winter…), the wall of snow and ice back there prevents the water from flowing away from the building and usually ends up flooding the hangar bay. We spent most of this past winter with 4 inches of polished solid ice covering the back half of the bay, gluing all my pallets and boxes of construction supplies and tools to the floor.
We have finally fixed one side of the building’s drainage problems! We took out the entire run of 6″ PVC and replaced it. Two big rains since then and still no leaks anywhere. The PVC part was relatively easy, although we still have to do the final leveling and putting in the proper brackets. Right now it is still mostly held up by rope. The hard part was opening up the outside wall to poke the pipe through the siding and get the water outside the building as straight and quickly as possible.
The original design had a two-sided wall at the ends of the office buildings. Not sure what purpose it served, but we had two layers of concrete siding to penetrate. Notice I’m calling it “concrete siding” instead of “asbestos siding”? You don’t look at the concrete slab on the floor and call it “steel rebar slab” because of the reinforcement material, do you? No! It is concrete! So our 1/2 inch thick corrugated concrete siding happens to have a little reinforcement fiber in it… Concrete/asbestos siding like this is technically encapsulated and not a hazard unless you drill or grind it up to aerosolize the fibers, which we are not doing. The problem is its weight, not the material!
OK, that was a lot of set-up… If you are still with me, here are the progression photos:
Hacking out the old drain pipes – sure hope it doesn’t rain… it did.
Removing the inner wall… the siding is 80% concrete and 20% asbestos, so the last thing we need to worry about is fire! We cut off the heads of the rusty 74 year old bolts with a torch and the siding pops right off.
See how easy that is? When it is only 5 feet off the ground.
Piling the siding for some future disposal… Concrete/asbestos like this can be disposed of in a regular landfill providing they choose to accept it. Yakutat doesn’t.
This is where it gets hard… You see the big crack along the bottom – a driver crashed into the building decades ago running 1/2 the length of the back wall. The small orange piece on the top row blew off in 2009 before we bought the hangar. Everything below it in two columns was barely hanging, making yet another liability reason the State wanted to unload the building to some idiot like me.
The remaining panels were bolted to each other, but no longer to the building. Just a matter of time before they came down on their own – possibly on someone.
We could do nothing to secure the loose pieces until that inner wall came down.
Carefully lowering the heavy slabs to the ground
Once the risky high siding was down, we could work from the bottom with the forklift
Stacking another successfully removed slab
Another pallet grows. We can store this stuff indefinitely, but I’d rather arrive at a good final solution in the near future – whatever that may mean… Probably fill a shipping container and pay to dispose of it in Anchorage
MonkeyBoy cleaning and painting the steel supports before we close the wall back up
The lower wall framed in and plywooded up
Ropes still holding the new pipes, waiting for the final fine-tuning and leveling
The water now has a straight shot OUT of the building. Eventually we’ll jackhammer out the road and run a drain out toward the creek, but for now it just freefalls. The 2″ pipe off the bottom will feed our cistern.
We sold just a single candy bar yesterday in the fly shop, but we’re still keeping ourselves busy… This may help explain my three week silence though.
And anther propaganda poster from the collection:
Bob's Blog - Situk River Fly Shop 