Every house, apartment building and office tower being built in our ever-expanding town depends on a solid concrete foundation.
While there has been a lot of talk about construction in the Sea to Sky Corridor lately, most people don’t know much about the specific jobs involved.
With this in mind, The Chief caught up with two Squamish men responsible for the foundations of many of our homes and businesses to find out more about their work.
Mark Clarke is a concrete truck driver with Cardinal Concrete, a ready-mixed concrete supplier that has operated in the Sea to Sky Corridor since 1973.
Clarke drives a 43,000-kilogram Western Star truck, with a drum on the back, delivering concrete to job sites.
He was involved pouring the concrete for the Sea to Sky Gondola, the new $30-million east dock at Squamish Terminals and for many of the new housing projects in Squamish.
“Everything from guys doing their own thing in their backyard all the way up to totally industrial, commercial stuff,” he said, describing the various jobs he has worked on.
When it is busy, Clarke can work between 10 to 14 hours a day and concrete foundations can be poured all year round.
He starts his day checking out his five-axle truck, then the drum is loaded first with concrete and then with water.
It is up to the driver to add the water to the mix and it is a huge expense if he gets the combination wrong, he said. The amount of water depends on how far the load has to go before it is used.
The weather and temperature impacts how concrete cures so both have to be taken into consideration at each build.
Additives can be put into the concrete to adjust for cool or hot temperatures.
“You aren’t just a truck driver, you are definitely in charge of quite a valuable commodity,” Clarke said.
He got his start in 1967 when “Canada was 100 years old and I was 18 years old,” driving a truck at an iron ore mine.
“I have been truck driving or running heavy equipment – a snow cat on Whistler in the winter – and various things for the last 50 years.”
The career is something he has always enjoyed, though he went to school for hotel management in his 20s.
Being stuck inside was not for him, he recalled with a laugh.
He likes that his job is different every day and that he gets to meet all sorts of people.
Darrell Hannan is a pump truck operator for Westland Concrete Pumping, which has been in operation since 2015.
He describes his job as “moving concrete from A to B.”
A concrete truck, similar to what Clarke drives, is backed into the rear end of Hannan’s pump truck, which has a 120-foot boom on top, and four stabilizers that attach to the ground and keep the pump truck level.
Hannan wears a controller around his neck that he uses to manipulate the boom to pour the concrete foundation.
He’s been a pump truck driver for 10 years.
Like Clarke, he has been involved in pouring concrete for many of the construction projects around town.
While speaking to The Chief, he was on site at Crumpit Woods, where he said he has poured the foundation for almost every home in the subdivision.
He concurred with Clarke that the best part of the job is that every day is different.
Also like Clarke, he recalled taking his truck up the backside of the Stawamus Chief to pour the foundations for the Sea to Sky Gondola.
He was also involved in many of the BC Hydro projects in the corridor.
“It is a rush sometimes, running the truck,” he said. “And scary because we don’t want to flip it over.”
He said a misconception about his job is that it is the easiest job on the construction site.
“Everybody thinks I got the easy job and that I play video games all day with my remote,” he said with a laugh.
“Concrete is a live entity and it keeps you on your toes.”
Work has been increasingly busy the last few years with so much construction, Hannan said.
“My golf game has definitely suffered,” he joked.
WorkBC statistics aren’t narrowed down to these two specific types of careers, but in the category of transport truck drivers and heavy equipment operators the median provincial salary is a little over $52,000 per year.
Not surprisingly, the biggest demand for these drivers is in the Lower Mainland, including Squamish. Ninety-six per cent of workers are male and 52 per cent of employees doing these jobs are between 45 and 65 years old.
Both jobs typically require a Class 3 license with air brakes plus a minimum of one-year heavy truck driving experience.
Concrete fun facts
~Compiled by Warren Kiland, sales manager for Cardinal Concrete and Westland Concrete Pumping
• Calling concrete ‘’cement’’ is like calling a cake ‘’flour.” Flour to cake is like cement to concrete. Cement acts as the glue in concrete that holds everything else together, which is composed of sand aggregate and water, as well as other additives.
• Construction companies add scents to concrete. The most famous is “bubble gum.”
• Concrete is used more than any other man-made material on the planet by volume. About six billion cubic meters of concrete are made each year, which equals one cubic meter for every person on Earth.
• A 12-million-year-old natural deposit found in Israel in the 1960s is the oldest known concrete, in which oil shale had combusted naturally near limestone, producing a natural layer of concrete.
• The ancient Romans were the first to develop concrete as a building material.
• Huge concrete dishes known as “concrete ears” or “sound mirrors” were erected during the Second World War to detect approaching aircraft.
