- Not a lot of hoarding most of the time;
- No warning signs or no "no trespassing" signs (if you break your leg too bad for you for being stupid enough to enter a construction zone) and
- NARROW lanes on the highway. SERIOUSLY NARROW!!! The right lane is a whopping 2.2m wide while the fast (left) lane is 2m wide (rather, narrow). Very freaky!!! My husband likes to go 100km/h in the 80km/h zone. I think it should be 60km/h.
But the one I am going to write about is the crane zone. In Canada, as far as I know and in my experience, loaded cranes do not sweep over non-construction zone. In fact, I've rarely seen an unloaded crane sweep over the public. Usually this area is hoarded off. In Europe, nope... it's construction hoisting at any time, no matter who is wandering about ignorantly below. Certainly things never drop on the unsuspecting!!?!
But just now, I witnessed the ultimate shocker! Just outside our apartment there were 2 men unloading an air conditioning unit from a truck. I thought it was a bit odd seeing that these things usually go up on roofs. The delivery truck left and the 2 men stood around for a while. Then I heard a helicopter. It nonchalantly dropped a cable to the men who hooked it onto the A/C unit in 15 seconds flat. Then the helicopter flew off into the distance with said A/C unit swooshing along behind it.
I followed the helicopter around to the other side of our building where the A/C unit swung over the city and surely over many unsuspecting people. Again, accidents never happen right?
Then as quickly as the chopper picked the unit up, they returned with just the cable for the same 2 men to disconnect. To disconnect the cables the helicopter hovered over the ground for a mere 3 seconds.
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| Doing laps overhead... |
So then I wondered.... How much does renting a helicopter for 30 minutes cost? The whole thing can't have taken more than 5 minutes, but I suppose these things take longer as they prepare etc... And the trouble of coordinating this... was it easy? Surely it was easier than renting a crane, organizing dates with TTC and hoisting an A/C unit over the Carlu in downtown Toronto in the snow on a stupid-early Saturday morning....???? Really!! We had to close the street down and get buses going along a street-car line which meant disconnecting overhead cables yadda-yadda-yadda....$$$$.... what a hassle!
Not to mention that our first attempt failed since the weather didn't cooperate. I wonder if we could have choppered-in the units. Probably not. Oh well!
