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Happening outside my bedroom right now


red750

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The video is 109MB, so it's pretty slow to download. I'm on NBN to the kerb with a fast speed, and it took a couple of minutes for me to download it. I'm using Windoze 7 and Chrome.

 

For those who can't download it, it's a 28 second video of the brick house next to Red750's being demolished by a Hyundai excavator.

 

For us in Perth, it's a pretty common sight, there is an unprecedented building boom going on here, it seems like a couple of houses in every street are being demolished here on a monthly basis - and the sad part is, a lot of them are still quite good houses. There's a lot of waste in the way this "urban renewal" is being carried out.

 

Edited by onetrack
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8 hours ago, onetrack said:

There's a lot of waste in the way this "urban renewal" is being carried out.

My thought when I saw this was, "What are they doing with the timber in the frame?" Really great reusable timber that will, no doubt, go to landfill. I suppose you only think these thoughts when you know you have a use for timber. I often wish I had a ute so that I could collect discarded pine furniture from the roadside. It's git a pretty good finish and in sizes that are convenient for other projects.

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You are right about the waste. It only took 2 guys (Iranian I was told), 3 hours to remove all the tiles from the roof. Just tossed them onto the concrete driveway to smash. Good tiles that could have been reused. The claw on the Hyundai picked up rubbish and dumped it through the rafters into the house. Nothing was reclaimed. They said they had till Wednesday to finish the job or they wouldn't get paid.

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I saw the opposite approach today.

 

There's a house about 5km from us that's been knocked down.  The family put up a nice shed first (obviously to live in while the new place is built), and today the house was gone - but there's a neat pile of framing timber, a neat stack of roof trusses, and a skip of bricks.

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The houses on my property are all built with recycled stuff, as are the sheds. There's waste transfer station not far from us and they are happy for me to take what ever I want from it, so everything is either off the property or from the transfer station. Our area has a lot of shackies who every year change all their furniture, sheds and dump it all at the waste station when they come for their holidays.

 

It's criminal to destroy good homes and materials, when we are rapidly depleting out resources. Which is another despicable failure of our governments, they are waste and pollution orientated and nothing else.

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There is a shortage of timber in Australia. All the forestry in Qld South of Rockhampton has been turned over to National Parks. Nat parks have in their wisdom got any cattle out of these parks and also closed all the apiary sites, because they are not indiginous species. Now we have very good stands of timber being wasted and due to lack of cattle the lantana is rampant. That is not an indiginous species, nor is the pig. Pigs are also increasing in number and causing great damage by rooting up the soil for food.

In the old days we had logging, but it was done with respect for the environment and bushwalking was far more enjoyable. One of the places I used to visit in a Nat Park has had a pathway cut through the lantana for about 200m so that you can crouch down and walk through it.

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1 hour ago, Yenn said:

There is a shortage of timber in Australia. All the forestry in Qld South of Rockhampton has been turned over to National Parks. Nat parks have in their wisdom got any cattle out of these parks and also closed all the apiary sites, because they are not indiginous species. Now we have very good stands of timber being wasted and due to lack of cattle the lantana is rampant. That is not an indiginous species, nor is the pig. Pigs are also increasing in number and causing great damage by rooting up the soil for food.

In the old days we had logging, but it was done with respect for the environment and bushwalking was far more enjoyable. One of the places I used to visit in a Nat Park has had a pathway cut through the lantana for about 200m so that you can crouch down and walk through it.

Despite my greenie tendencies, I totally agree, Yenn. I have a brother who has been fighting (and losing) this battle for years. Our Grandad was a forestry leader and some relatives are still in that industry. State Forestries had developed a fairly sustainable selective logging regime, with a decades-long rotation of tree blocks that gave most of the ecosystem a chance to recover from logging. As a kid I often roamed these forestry reserves and they were better-managed than today’s National Parks.

 

Unforturtunately, too many of my greenie brethren were misinformed by images of clear felling, which was mostly associated with the woodchip industry. 

Bob Carr got lots of votes for turning state forests into National Parks, but has never provided the resources to properly manage them. As their sources of logs shrank, small timber towns lost their main employer.

Small towns withered; most of my school mates ended up in suburbia. Former greenie demonstrators can now get cheap timber products obtained from stripping tropical rainforests in poor countries.

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Talk about the run-around. Following yesterday's demonstration in the city by the CMFEU because the construction workers were banned from using their smoko/tea room because of Covid (many outbreaks started on  construction sites), the government put a 2 week hold on all construction sites. This caused further civil unrest in Melbourne streets today. However, that didn't stop the guys next door, creating an unearthly din with the Hyundai excavator, smashing concrete slabs, then using a slotted bucket on the machine to shake and seive dirt from the rubble. Not only that, but our house was shaking with each bang of the bucket on the slab. With my wife's health conditions, she is just about out of her mind, just wants peace and quiet.

 

We called the council about the work proceeding next door after the workbans were put in place. They said to ring the police. Rang the police, they said to ring Coronavirus.vic.gov.au who look after breaches of orders. The girl took details, but said contact police. Got a call from the council giving me the name of the building surveyor in charge of the project. He said he couldn't go out here due to the workbans, and was only involved to sign off permits. Got a call from health dept to say that the ban only applied to major worksites and domestic building could continue. No-one gives a ....! By the looks of things, they will be finished this afternoon  -  with any  luck.

 

PS.  Just about everyone I spoke to had a foreign accent.

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  • 3 months later...

Three and a half months later, and they are still being a bloody nuisance. The huge concrete slab was poured yesterday. Speed restrictions in the street, footpath blocked for the concrete pump, cement trucks coming and going.  Today they are levelling the ground around the slab. A skid-steer back and forth with that bloody warning beeper going the whole time.

 

Last night my son was honoured, with a number of others, for their service to the Australian Open, in his case, 20 years umpiring. As he was late home from the tennis, he decided to work from home. That beeper is a damned nuisance for his phone calls.

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  • 3 months later...

Well, after nearly four months, they have actually started putting up the frame for the new house. When my son came home from work tonight, he told me the builders had set up a microwave on top of their powerbox, and gone home with the poer on and the door open, so you can see the light on inside. The company website says the phone no. is open till 7.00 pm weekdays. I called the number at 6;45 and the recorded message said they work till 5:00 pm. Called the police, their phone system said they had many calls, my call was in the queue, expected response time 35 minutes. Just as bad as Australia Post.

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