Public Relations

denick

Before you start a job, do you ever stop by the nieghbors, introduce yourself and explain what your going to be doing? Do you try to schedule work around what the neighborhood schedule seems to be? Do you and your people make the effort to make life easier for the public? Or do you just go like heck and what happens happens?


Nick

rino1494

Never made a point on going to people's houses to explain my job. Most of the time, they will come out to be nosey and b/s. We are always nice to them and they will always wave and say hi. During the week, we start at 7 AM...on Saturdays, I try and hold off till 7:30 to fire up the machines.

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TMatt142

Wow...the PR nightmare! When I was a superintendent up in MN it was a MUST that you be a PR type guy as well. There is so much BS a guy has to go through just to build a road nowadays that that was a small part of the reason I left. I was always considerate and polite to the people impacted and tried to give them warnings and info as to what we were doing. I did that till it was no longer time to be considerate and polite. A lot of these people know that if they call their state inspectors on the jobs they can get anything done (at least in MN it's that way). Our inspectors would have us doing some crazy stuff just to apease the neighbors who didn't like the dust, didn't like the look of the silt fence, didn't like the equipment parked this way or that, didn't like the operators starting up early to grease. At some point in time during the project it was always time to stop being MR. NICEGUY. I Had a guy come out who was in charge of a superfund site come and try to shut down my whole operation due to the dust in the immediate excavation area. (I couldn't water the haul road because we were digging a pond and it was 16ft cut. The bellies were running down on the bottom and had a steep grade to get out. To water it would have gotten the trucks stuck in the bottom of the cut. I explained that to the guy kindly and was told to not say anything to him unless it was intelligent! ......Figure the rest of the story out
Did I A) pack up the whole operation (a D6, 345 Cat, and 18 belly dumps)
B) Water the immediate haul road and watch my 18 bellies spin around the bottom of the pond?
c) Created a dust cloud the likes of which nobody has ever seen?
D) Spread sand over the Clay......then watered the Sand to keep it compacted enough to drive
on.......

rino1494

I would do C

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Life is hard. It is harder when you are stupid

Uncle Sam wants YOU....to speak ENGLISH

jmic

I don't go knocking on any doors but try to be polite when approached by neighbors. Never start before 7am. The other day this lady neighbor is poking in and out of bushes taking pictures of foundation excavation hole. WTF beetch, take a picture of this!

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Joe

jls

TMatt142 i would do C also. I can usually be nice and just yell at the dash of the backhoe later but sometimes people need to be confronted at how stupid they are. I had to deal with the picture taking people one crossed the fence and crawled into a hole i was filling up to get at "worms eye view of the backhoe" thank god someone saw her before i dumped 1 yard worth of dirt on her. Some real crackers out there.

Wolf

Anybody ever run into tricky PR issues when doing demolition?

Like hysterical preservation folks trying to save some skanky old building?

Tree huggers?

Let's hear some good stories bout them. How did you handle it?

dayexco

wolf, you have a demo fetish, don't you?

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someday, i'll be as patient as Nick.

jmic

Wolf lives to crunch things up!

__________________
___"Remember You Never Get A Second Chance To Make A First Impression"______________________
Joe