Forwarded for ][<en, without the photos that bounced the original
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From: Gabriel Orgrease <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Bay St Louis - the Crane & the Old Wall
To: The listserv that takes flossing seriously!
<[log in to unmask]>,
 
[log in to unmask] wrote:

> "anybody that doesn't have a job.... doesn't want to work " said the
> crane operator .
>  
> Bay St. Louis DEC 14 : take any street any road ,walk down any path
> and as far as the eye can see there is a debris field of humanity and 
>  what once was .....
> Got a tent and don't need creature comforts ..head South young man  go

> to  N'awlins or Bay St.Louis  Mississippi ....go into the lot any 
> building supply house and  hold up a sign that  says "Carpenter 
> looking for work "  you won't be there 15 mins
> Py

P & A Crane Service
Bill Averhart
(228) 216-2308
Locally Owned & Operated, Insured
Longbeach, MS

The man knows his craft and has a really fine attitude.

In the attached photo of the wall section being loaded onto the trailer:

Bill in the foreground. Louis Linden, National Trust Hurricane Response 
Coordinator in the black shirt, baseball cap & holding the tag line. 
Glenn James, PTN board member & treasurer w/ blue shirt & pony tail. The

wall... a full section of the 1790-1810 timber frame of the Hecker House

including riven lath, base & chair rail, plaster, interior paint & 
hand-planed beaded clapboard.

The second photo shows the infamous flat tire.

The sign that you can't see in front of the steeple of the Methodist 
Church says, "Do not remove this steeple."

When the crane arrived we could not get him close to the work without 
removing about 3' of sand that had been put there by the hurricane. A 
skid loader showed up right when the press op was starting. It was a bit

of a situation to keep the energetic skid operator from either running 
over heritage timbers or abusing the wandering around people. I had a 
shovel in hand and banged on the top of his cab a few times to get his 
attention. Once we had the crane in place things went well enough until 
it was time to move out. As we removed a full wall section we needed the

crane to go with us to the storage location for unloading of it.

It had rained the night before so the first thing that happened is that 
the front of the crane got dug into the mud. Louis got a small tractor 
from Scott, our local carpenter & contractor liaison, to help pull out 
the crane. The crane got pulled out and nearly ran over our pile of 
heritage timbers (it may have been the 2nd time the pile had to be moved

by hand... note that though a good portion of the structure was intact 
at the original site a large quantity of it had been blown about 
150-200' to the backside of the lot away from the beach -- a good deal 
of heritage fabric was dug up out of the accumulated mess -- though I 
had repeatedly warned about stepping on nails, and was diligent in the 
duty of clearing pathways, I stepped on two nails, though fortunate that

they did not meet flesh -- finding a workign toilet was interesting in 
itself). The truck to pull the trailer with the wall on it was not able 
to handle the mud and another truck was brought. The tractor went away 
and the crane quite abruptly got stuck again on leaving the site... at 
which point, stuck in the mud against a fence the tire was cut & went 
flat. It hissed whild we had to wait for the tractor to return. 
Fortunate there were dual tires. Bill's wife was there, having brought 
over his lunch, and she let him know what she thought of it.

We had to take the American flag (the one we had found in the remains of

the Hecker House) off from the wall in order to make it under overhead 
wires on the road. The trip to the storage site, an area that was in 
worse shape than where we were working, was fairly uneventful until we 
got to the storage site. In the middle of the drive to the shop there 
was a DEAD Toyota Land Cruiser that, according to Scott, had not been 
there the night before. We pushed it out of the way by hand. Smashed a 
few tailights along the way but got the trailer & the wall backed up to 
in front of the shop.

At this point Bill pointed out to us that we were nextdoor to his 
brother in law's house - yellow house & shed photo. There was a shed 
about 10' in height that Bill told us a 30' sailboat was going over when

Bill's b-in-law who was stuck on the roof of his house threw out an 
extension cord, lasoed the boat, climbed into the cabin and rode out the

remainder of the storm. The house, a fairly large one, was pushed 40' 
back off its piers.

Though we were able to unload the wall section from the trailer we were 
not able to go further. We braced it up for a temporary enclosure. In 
the mean time as the trailer was leaving the site with Louis and myself 
following behind it there was a loud explosion. We both jumped. Turned 
out the trailer had driven over a soccer ball.

As an education experience it was a typical complex decision tree that 
we had to deal with right from the beginning. Louis put it sweetly in 
saying that nobody in Bay St. Louis is allowed to complain until they 
get to plan G. There is a healthy sense of black humor that reminds me 
of post-9/11 in NYC.

One thing to note when looking at the wall is that the Hecker's lived in

the house for 50 years without ever knowing how it was framed out. The 
frame of the house was buried under interior treatments and the 
hand-planed beaded clapboard that you see in the last photo was actually

buried in an adjoining wall between the original structure and a much 
larger rear extension.

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