By Pepper Parr
BURLINGTON, ON January 13, 2010 There is a little progress every day – and the unseasonably warm weather the last few weeks has allowed Graham Infrastructure of Mississauga to get much more work done than originally expected.
Lot of fog when this picture was taken - but if you look closely - all the beams that were atop the caissons on the left of the Pier are no longer there.. The trestle, used by construction equipment, is on the right side.
While it was foggy the day we took some of the pictures set out below it is quite clear now that all the beams put in place by Harm Schilthuis and Sons Ltd. of Ancaster, before they walked off the job in December of 2009, have now been removed. With colder weather setting in there won’t be much that can get done with a slippery, icy surface out there on the Pier.
This photograph, taken before the "faulty steel was taken out, shows just how much work had been done on the Pier. New steel will be put in place in the spring.
Fabricating of the new beams is believed to be underway. If there is an early spring we just might see new beams being stalled which will signal that the building of the Pier is real and that we are at least heading into the home stretch.
Where does all that steal go? Well it won’t get made into razor blades quite yet – there are more than a handful of lawyers who want to take a close, almost microscopic look at those beams because a large part of the several lawsuits that are floating around rest on the quality and make up of those steel beams.
And, by the way, whose property are they?
Harm Schilthuis and Sons Ltd. is in the process of trying to clarify in the mind of the public, some of the issues related to the role they played in the building that took place during what the city engineering people now call phase one the Pier project . Phase two is the “new” day with the city believing that they have a solid new contractor in place and all the technical support they didn’t have during phase one.
No word from the city’s legal department as to where things are with the civil trial. All we hear from them is that they aren’t going to say a word about how much they’ve spent on lawyer’s fees to date. Were they to do that the spotlight would certainly shift from the folks in engineering to the folks in the legal department. It is going to be an ‘ouch’ of a legal bill.
