Working on an underground Vault lid at a Commercial Excavation site

[Music] all right guys one of my buddies called me up and said hey i got a cool idea for a video and this is a guy that runs a huge company so if there's something cool he's doing on a job site well that's worth at least going to check it out problem is is he's a union shop and they work on only on commercial sites so it's full ppe i've got my safety vest on problem is i can't find my hard hat anywhere the only hard hat i can find is my tree hard hat which i don't know it's better than nothing but uh i gotta find my hard hat i'm gonna end up going out on a commercial site wearing that hard hat which technically covers me i mean i can do it i just i'm gonna look like a dork hello hello no hard hats i think it's gonna answer me back yeah i'm over here stan i'm mr hard hat i'm in the i'm in the back of the shelf all right you know what i'm gonna take you along for the search but i'm gonna take you along for the job site so let's go there now all right well i'm here i gotta get my darn hard hat on i gotta fix this thing i can't go out to that site looking like this there now i got a normal hard hat [Applause] so this is a district energy job and life with nova frost does all of their work for them rubber tracks just say hi to brad he runs everything how are you doing buddy good to meet you nice to see ya so what do you got what do you got going on with this job we're going to take these tops get them out of here and then we'll start setting these lids on we're going to ram neck them down and set them okay he was saying we only use two of them special picks do you have them in place now so you core drill that into the concrete you drill them in with like a three-quarter inch bit and then you epoxy them in so what's down in the pit there's a return to supply steam line hot water pipe in between [Music] all right something else i want to show you guys you see this cut right here you see the ledge step up ledge step up that's how you make the cut so before the vault lid goes back on you put the weather stripping around the outside yeah it's a ram neck that's what it is so it's a butyl rubber what they'll do is they'll lay it down one or two layers on the ledges here and then they'll lift each piece of the lid in place so that it squishes down the butyl rubber to create a weather barrier so then once the lid is all set they'll use a butyl rod in between the joints of the lids and then they'll grout each joint all the way around and they'll uh weatherproof the roof and then once that's all done then they'll start backfilling what was the repair they had to do down here we had some valves in here that had been here since 1984 that were inoperable and so in order for us to be able to isolate different services and different legs of our loops yeah we got to isolate those valves so we removed them and replaced them with uh valves that are more current and up to date and then they're putting on a rg product that keeps the discharge piping from corroding and then they're insulating over the top of that hey brad where did your excavation spoils go to back to the shop okay so you you calculated into the bid to haul it all off and then you got to haul it all back yeah how many yards was it ah it was 22 truckloads 14 yards of load so how are you going to compact it when you put it back packer just uh just a thousand pound plate package yeah in this case you wouldn't use your roller packer because that's just too much yeah especially on top of the vault isn't it yep we don't need it it's all in a green area we'll have good clean fill sand coming back again 95 95 okay so in case you guys don't know what that means 95 standard proctor density in a green area is what you want to go to if it was underneath the building pad what is it is it 99 brad underneath the building pad is 100 it's 100 you ever watch people go by and think they just want to get hit people seem to look at traffic signs as suggestions not the law [Music] we're using the steel plates to keep the weight of the machine off from the sidewalks we want to stay off this granite curb so it's not the sidewalk it's the granite curve it's more of the granite curve but it is the sidewalk also helps spread out the weight i'm flipping these twelve thousand pound piece of the concrete each lid weighs twelve thousand pounds a big one lays 12 and these weigh about nine [Music] okay guys so what you see him doing right now is he's getting his machine set up in the right spot so that when he lifts that 12 000 pound piece of concrete down in place he's got no tilt or wiggle to the machine because he doesn't want that moving while he's trying to lower the concrete vault lid down brad it's almost like you guys have done this once or five times before i watch a youtube video so the next part of the project is you gotta crawl down not touch the granite curves to get over to the other two lids which are over here [Music] [Applause] [Music] now in the world of excavation there's kind of like different levels to excavation there's residential excavation which allows just about anybody that owns an excavator or skid steer to perform then there's commercial excavation which has a different set of rules and regulations that you need to know before you jump into that game otherwise it could be pretty disastrous but then on top of commercial excavation is union commercial excavation and that requires a completely different set of rules that you must adhere to before you can jump into that now we used to be a union commercial excavation shop but what we found was that the rules and regulations that we had to adhere to here apply to everything that you do which kind of kicked us out of this lower market of residential excavation which for us was extremely lucrative so it was it was a choice we had to make do we stay a union commercial contractor or do we forego that and jump down into the residential market and give it everything we had now personally that's the route we took just because i love working with people one-on-one and making their dreams come true and when you're doing a job site like you've seen today you don't really get to do that you actually have a set of blueprints that you build off from and well when you're done building off from those blueprints your job is done to each their own i hope this video has helped you guys out so that you can see what it's like out on a union commercial excavation underground utility site because my buddy mike frost from nova frost runs probably one of the best ones around and i wanted to take you guys out onto one of those job sites and show you what it's like when you're running one of those projects god bless you guys whatever whatever path you choose i hope it is awesome for each and every single one of you