Fire hall lives on in other structures

Fire hall lives on in other structures
By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby NOW assistant editor
Published Feb. 2, 2003

What goes up, must come down. And if you're really lucky, it'll just keep going around and around and around, too.
Demolition crews tore down the old Fire Hall No. 2 on Edmonds Street last week, but instead of simply throwing most of the old building into the garbage bin, the majority of scrap material will be recycled.
Steve Tremblay, operator foreman for 3R Demolition, said all of the wood, steel and concrete from the 52-year-old building will be resold to recycling firms around the Lower Mainland for later reuse around the world.
"Out of this whole job, maybe three truckloads will go to the landfill and the rest is recycled," Tremblay said. "I'd say 90 per cent of the job was recycled in one form or another."
Tremblay, who has worked in the demolition industry for 22 years, says customers can't wait to get their hands on some of the high quality older building materials, like the old-growth timber that was used to build the old fire hall.
"You should see the material they used on this. We've pulled out two-by-10s and three-by-18s - that's wood you just don't see anymore," he said. "We even have some three-by-six tongue-in- groove."
"There's people all over the Lower Mainland looking for this. We've even heard from people in the United States and Japan looking for it. So there is a market for it."
Tremblay said 3R Demolition calls upon a long list of past customers when they have old materials to sell. Other times, passersby stop and ask for dibs on the wood, or else the firm occasionally runs ads in newspapers to sell some of the less marketable materials.
All the metal in the building, such as the old stove, metal flashing and rebar from inside the concrete, will be resold to a foundry.
Even the old concrete foundation, which did poor service keeping water out of the building for the past few decades, will be ground up to be reused as gravel.
But not everybody is big on the recycling business. Tremblay says some people who purchase the denser old growth wood are not happy with their purchase. "Apparently some of that old wood is too hard to drive a nail into.”