blasting and signs

So they started blasting on the ridge right behind the cabins yesterday. Seems like it is going to be a daily thing now, though in the last safety meeting we had they said they were blasting three times a day. That I found hard to believe considering the amount of drilling and work that goes into each blast. Out staff were given instructions on what we had to do leading up to, during and after the blast. The housekeepers had to guard doorways leading out of camp and the 1st cook has to guard the door leading to the back of the kitchen while everyone else in the dining room has to keep people away from the windows during the blast. Though Tony had a good point in that if a stray rock or something were to come flying at the camp because of the explosives that were laid under/around it, the debris would fly through the camp wall and pretty much through anyone standing in it's path...window or wall, it would go through you.

Yesterday was the first blast. Of course everyone came to the dining room earlier than they were supposed to and some were even standing at the window or stepping back from it with their camera in hand trying to get the most optimal spot for the blast. When I looked out at the dining room just before the blast happened, everyone was sitting as close to the windows as they possibly could to get a look at this blast up close. After all, we have seen blasts from a distance and we see smoke, dust and rock go flying up in a big display and a lot of noise and who doesn't like to see destruction at that level, right?

So everyone is sitting in the dining room except for one of the big bosses who came to the back kitchen area where the 1st cook was guarding and got a front row seat at one of the windows. I can see the hypocrisy in that statement since the rule we were given was no one was allowed to be anywhere near a window and this boss was standing at the window, basically with his face pressed up against the glass. I guess it is true that there are rules for the rulers and rules for the ruled. Either that or everyone knows that if you lose the life of a grunt underling working then production and all is lost in the company but if you lose the life of a manager/supervisor/big boss, no real time is lost. Shows who is doing all the real work in the company huh?

So cameras are ready, people are milling around in the dining room and I can almost feel the excitement wafting in from them. Mind you, I am in the kitchen still working cause I was already behind on the breakfast prep due to a few snags on the prep for the dinner. Finally there is a call on the radio and we hear a "PHHOMP" and the ground shakes a bit. The sound and feeling I got reminded me of a long time ago in Burnaby with my dad.

Well, not sure if this is an actual memory or a dream of some sort that I had but I keep remembering it. Anyways, I remember standing with my brother just under the balcony of our place. I remember dad telling us to stand really still and not to move. I remember the step he was on was about a hundred miles up in the sky (so, if you rate that from kid to adult to actual height, he probably wasn't more than 2 feet above our 3 foot height at the time) and he dropped a cinder block about 5 feet from where we were standing, or at least dropped it somewhere in the area of where we were. I remember the fascination of feeling the ground shake at the PHHOMP the block made hitting the ground. So that is what the blast felt like. Of course, after feeling and hearing I really wasn't blown away (hee hee..so punny am I*G*) by the whole thing and went up to the 1st cook and mentioned that it sounded like the baker had fallen out of his bed.

So today when the blast happened I noticed a distinct difference in the way that people reacted to the blast. There were no cameras, there was no nervous chatter about what was happening and what the people did that day. You know how when people are nervous or scared they seem to go on and on about the most mundane things, almost like if they talk about the boring and mundane they forget about what is making them nervous or scared. One other thing I noticed is that yesterday everyone was sitting as close as they possibly could to the windows which I am assuming was because they were hoping to catch a glimpse of the blast. Today, however, everyone was sitting as close as they possibly could to the coffee machine on the far opposite side of the dining hall, total opposite side of the hall as to where the window was. The only thing that remained the same was that the big boss was in the back of the kitchen at the window but this time he brought a friend to stand by the window. Guess everyone wasn't told that it was a 'blanketed' blast. They basically covered the whole blast area with a covering and tires. So all you see is the tires go up slightly and go down again. It is like watching the sheets in bed of your sleeping partner when they break wind.

Needless to say, the whole blast thing is wasted on me in terms of excitement.

However, one thing that has me laughing in the kitchen are the two signs that we have posted in the dining room. We had problems with people putting their tray and plates with food on it on the dish rack. The response to this problem was to put up signs on the wrack letting people know to discard their garbage. However, the wording that they used was “please clean your plates” on the wrack with arrows pointing to the garbage can location. So people followed the arrows which lead to the garbage cans BUT the first thing that they hit before the garbage cans were two sinks for people to wash their drinking jugs and all. So people started doing what the signs said and they would throw their garbage in the can and then actually rinse their plate off in the sink before bringing it to the sink.

Now the dishwashers loved this idea since he was the one that started the whole ‘rinse and scrub your pots/pans in the back sink before bringing it to the dishpit’ idea. However, it was causing a problem cause the sink was not designed for the constant plate washing and was plugging up on a regular basis. So what was the solution? If you guessed taking the sign down and rewording it to something like ‘please scrape garbage into bins’ you are wrong. The solution was to make a sign to hang over the sink reading “please do not clean your plates in the sink”. I knew it didn’t make sense but didn’t really realise that people were reading it until I saw a new lady in camp standing there with her plate in hand looking at the one sign to clean her plate and then the other saying don’t clean it here and then back saying to clean her plate. Almost like she was trying to decide which sign to listen to. I had to go up and break her wonderment by telling her the proper procedure of the whole thing.

Got me thinking about the stupid meeting they made me go to a week ago for the health and safety where someone said that there is actually a sign out in one of the pits reading “yield to buried cable”. He asked the safety guy running the meeting exactly how does a truck yield to a buried cable. After hearing about this sign I so want to go out and take a picture of it so that I can send it to a late night talk show under their heading of stupid signs posted in the work area or in public.