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Old 04-26-2008, 02:30 PM
demoman518 demoman518 is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Upstate NY
Posts: 44
Default Fire levels 5 mills in Johnstown NY

I don't know if anyone saw this but the fire was started "accidently" by a demolition company.

This did a few million dollars worth of damage to adjacent homes and businesses. From what the contractor said on TV it seems to be more negligence then accident. Here are the circumstances and you decide

Johnstown is letting a group of young guys that have experience only in landscaping go into vacant building and harvest scrap (copper, aluminum, etc). They split it 50/50 w/contractor. They were using a demo-saw cutting conduit and the sparks ignited some old chemicals left laying around. From my experience and per OSHA guidelines the 1st thing our super and/or project manager is supposed to do at any demo site is identify any hazards by doing a pre-demolition survey. If these young man had any experience they would have noticed chemicals in the spray zone for sparks and either cold cut, had a seperate person w/fire extinguisher or moved the chemicals.

In retrospect I think the best thing for these towns to do is pre-qualify people to perform work.
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