Tradies Zac, Deshawn and Jordan from Pil Bros Contracting finish off the Active Travel Network bike path in Forest Hill. Photo: Marguerite McKinnon.
In a week-long stretch of 40-plus degrees Celsius days that reached a high of 45 on Wednesday (28 January), tradies were the superheroes of the workforce.
They were up before dawn and putting in the hard yards to finish targets and keep our region moving; building houses, roadworks, and repairing gas, water and electricity problems, and completing roadworks for the rest of us who scrambled to find relief from the heat.
When we need a tradie, we need a tradie, extreme weather or not.
When asked how work had been in the heat, the comments were refreshingly unfiltered.
“Shit,” said Jordan, who works for Wagga-based construction company Pil Bros Contracting.
“Hot, yeah hot. Very hot.”
The attitude at worksites, however, was to “just get on with it”.
“It’s a bit rough, but yeah,” said his colleague Deshawn.
“We just pump the water and get into it.”
Tradies’ trucks line the streets where new houses are being built in Forest Hill. Photo: Marguerite McKinnon.
By 6 am in Forest Hill, the roads were lined with ‘tradie trucks’ – sign-covered utes and carts outside rows of new houses as tradesmen and women maximised working conditions as they installed cabinetry, pipes and electrics, and painted and landscaped.
Laying concrete before sunrise at one of the new houses in Forest Hill as workers get in early to beat the heat. Photo: Marguerite McKinnon.
A street away, workers from Paul Demmery Concreting and Maloney Concreting – Brendan, Simon, Caleb, Paul, Andrew and Nick – were also at it before sunup, pouring concrete. It was all hands on deck and the focus was the pour, not the weather. But they obliged when asked with no truer a word said.
“It’s hot,” said Brendan before turning back to help the base load get poured into the waffle boxes and beams.
Every day since Sunday (25 January) the temperature was over 40 degrees Celsius, and many workers who call the outdoors their office started their day earlier to try to avoid the heat.
Workers at Australia Post and various couriers dropped off parcels and letters earlier. Delivery workers for Big Springs Water did the same, alerting businesses and homes to have their empty bottles ready earlier so they could be collected, and replaced with litres of fresh spring water.
“We finish when the job’s done, so no, we don’t usually knock off early,” Jordan said.
The can-do attitude of tradies across the region has earned respect further afield. Jay and Eve Jenkins started their business, Complete Road Seal (CRS), in 2007. It’s not a stretch to say that every person who’s walked around town in Wagga has at some point walked on roads and pathways laid by CRS. The most recent is the more-than-50- kilometre-long Active Travel Network bike path.
“We’ve done probably 80 per cent of the travel network around Wagga,” Jay said.
“We’ve done around the lake (Albert), Estella, through North Wagga, some subcontracting through another company on the western side of Wagga; we’ve done all through Bourkelands, and now Forest Hill.
“It actually rides really good. We’ve done a few tests on it to see and it rides very nice.
“We do a lot of government work with councils around the Riverina, and for Transport NSW, and now we manufacture our own asphalt.”
Director and part owner of Pil Bros, Mitch Pilon, said workers had been laying concrete for the Forest Hill Bike Path with big work days seeing as much as 250 metres of pathway laid in a day. All that’s left to do is to remove some fencing and the path is open to the public to enjoy.
“We enjoy doing what we do, yeah we love that side of things,” Mr Pilon said.
When the heat subsides, the talking point will be the quality of the work, and Pil Bros is confident.
“It’s all gone pretty smoothly,” Mitch said.
To all the men and women who fill their steel capped boots and get to work to keep this region going, we salute you.
