A little Belfast history! On the outskirts of Belfast is a range of hills
in which is a layer of limestone. In Victorian times this was quarried to
grind and send to the Mainland to be fed to chickens to improve the egg
shells. From the quarry, right down to the docks was a bogy track on the
line of a road now called the Limestone Road. When I first went to Belfast,
I found a narrow street off it called Tramway Street, which puzzled me for a
long time. It was there the bogeys or ‘trams’ were stored. I found all
this out when I was looking for filling for Belfast Airport.
When making concrete of very high quality the stone used has to be as near
cubical in shape as is possible and there was only one quarry viable. The
quantities to be bought were huge One of my jobs was to check on materials
and this day I could not make the amount of concrete agree with the amount
of stone we had paid for to make the concrete. As we were using a very
sophisticated method of making concrete where the quantities of the various
materials were accurately measured, there was no way the discrepancy of
having bought some thirty percent more stone than we should have used could
be accounted for. Others checked the books with the same result, –
something serious was amiss. We checked the weigh-bridge which we had
installed at the edge of the site, it was OK.
Stories throughout the building industry tell of lorries defeating the
system. With sand it is a matter of spraying the lorry with water just near
the site so the buyer is buying water at the price of sand. A certain
amount of moisture is essential to stop the sand blowing during transport
and this is what unscrupulous contractors sometimes play on. Then there is
the old chestnut of the lorry going in one gate, being checked, going out
another gate and then, after a bit, going round again to be checked yet
again. It was with this in mind we set up our own weigh bridge and checking
system, the site was too large to police. We filled one of our own lorries,
sent it to the Town weigh bridge and then checked it on our own. It was
fine. It is usual on a site to weigh the contractors’ lorries empty and to
note the weight which is known as the ‘tare weight’. This saves having to
weigh the lorries full and empty every trip and provided nothing has
changed, the system works, except when the initial weight has been fiddled
by removing all the surplus weight such as the jack, and the spare wheel and
then subsequently carrying it – that can amount to quite a sum on a big job.
We checked that too, then we set our boxer friend to sit near the weigh
bridge with a novel, and look like someone unemployed enjoying the sun.
It paid off. The weighbridge was level in itself but had been built on
sloping ground. The lorries were very long with two axles at the back. The
system we had agreed was that the weigh bridge man would see the front
wheels of the lorry onto the weigh bridge, go into his office and press a
button, the weight would then be recorded automatically, he would then wave
through the window and the lorry would slowly move forward until the back
two sets of wheels were on the bridge and the front ones off. He would then
weigh again and the sum of the two weights less the tare weight was what we
paid for. Our boxer friend found that unfortunately this was not the case.
When the bridge man had seen the lorries onto the bridge and was on his way
into the hut, the lorries would ease that little bit more forward until half
the back wheels were on the bridge as well as the front ones, then, when the
bridge man waved, the lorry would ease forward again and the two back axles
were weighed. What was happening was that we had been unwittingly weighing
one set of back wheels twice.
More Lessons I Learned I learned never to say right when it could be
misconstrued. It was early morning and I needed to examine the surface
water system of the old runway. The chainman and his sidekick had been
struggling to get an old manhole cover off and once again I forgot what had
been drilled into me in my Naval days, ‘never volunteer’. I was in a hurry
so I went to help them. We managed to get the cover clear of the hole and
then I thought I had done all that was required of me, so I said ‘Right!’
meaning I was letting go and they were in control. Of course, like all
slapstick comedies, they let go too and this huge, cast iron disc weighing
nearly a hundred weight and a half fell on my foot. Instead of severing the
toe, it only broke it, I was wearing dispatch rider’s boots instead of the
standard wellie.