From the Post:
Race to finish ROM at breakneck speed
Peter Kuitenbrouwer, National Post
Published: Thursday, May 10, 2007
Yesterday at 9:10 a.m., a cordless electric drill sailed off the roof of the new addition to the Royal Ontario Museum. The drill fell about 40 metres, gathering speed, and narrowly missed cars and cyclists before smashing into two pieces on Bloor Street.
The orange battery pack, about the weight of a brick, stayed in the middle of the street; the yellow drill itself, with a bit about 15 cm long, bounced and came to rest at the door of the Park Hyatt Hotel.
"Wow," said an architect I was chatting with, who also saw the drill fall. "Those things should be tied off. He'll get a reprimand for that."
It's lucky no one was hurt; at the same time I am not surprised a worker dropped a drill. Almost every worker I've spoken to on the job here tells me they are working seven days a week, up to 12 hours a day. Bleary-eyed, clutching coffee cups, they are struggling to complete perhaps the most challenging job in Toronto: architect Daniel Libeskind's flight of fancy called "the Michael Lee Chin Crystal."
"I've never worked overtime for any other company like this," Brian McLean, an ironworker, told me, while smoking cigarettes outside McDonald's across from the ROM. "Like, I've worked overtime, but this just has been ridiculous here."
Mr. McLean has been on this job for two years, since the completion of the building's
steel frame. Since October, he has worked seven days a week, 10 hours a day. Still, he is not complaining: His regular wage is $32.50 an hour; the other 30 hours a week his boss, subcontractor Perma-Steelisa, pays him $65 an hour.
At yesterday's unveiling of Libeskind's new chair for the ROM, William Thorsell, the museum's chief executive, told me the building will be "95% complete" for its gala opening on June 2 with the Premier and the Governor-General. "Like all buildings we will tune it up over the next couple of years." He also said the renovations will cost $270-million, $20-million more than the ROM said the project would cost in a news release April 30.
I asked workers whether they'd be done on June 2.
"It depends on what you call finished," one replied.
Today, big parts of the roof on the easternmost "crystal" remain without aluminum cladding. The work resembles rock-climbing: about two dozen workers, wearing harnesses tied to ropes, rappel up and down the cliff-like sides of the structure, more than 30 metres in the air, bolting the aluminum panels into place. Others work on blue "zoom booms," which are like extended cherry picker trucks.
Tuesday night, C.W. Smith drove away its mammoth orange Grove crane, which had been useful to lift supplies to the roof. The crane had to go so workers could begin landscaping the plaza in front of the Crystal. Now, the ironworkers have rigged a kind of clothesline along which they slide pieces of aluminum from the roof of the old ROM to the roof of the Crystal.
"Everything looks good on computer, but to get the guys up there and working all these weird places, the guys will do it but it takes longer," Mr. McLean said. Leaks in the roof slowed the job too, he said.
Trevor, a carpenter, is working six days a week, 10 hours a day. Right now he's putting hardware on the doors. Steve Greenhorn, an apprentice elevator mechanic, said that so far his company, Fujitec Elevator, has completed three of six new elevators (although one of those was having problems yesterday) and has three more to complete, one of them the freight elevator.
"We have worked some days until two in the morning," he told me.
And is the project on budget? The guys on the job broke into laughter when I asked that one.
That ROM news release 10 days ago called "Renaissance ROM" a "$250-million expansion and renovation project." Yesterday Mr. Thorsell said that in 2001, the ROM budgeted the job at $200-million. Today the budget is $240-million. "It's about a 20% increase over six years, which I think is pretty good," he said. However, the ROM has another $30-million bill for "fundraising and financing costs and fit out of retail and restaurants," Mr. Thorsell said. "We have now raised $225- million and we have to get to $270-million," he said.
Has all this cash and sweat been worth it? Everyone's got an opinion, and I'll share some of them in tomorrow's column.
Pkuitenbrouwer@nationalpost.com
© National Post 2007
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