There is lots of demand for this time of year. Right now we are setting bridge beams and doing steel erection. There is a boom for restaurants and strip malls in the area.
Ten years ago it was unheard of to work through the winter. In the last few years we haven’t had to lay anyone off in the wintertime. In western Canada they always work year-round; now the New Brunswick market is growing.
We use supplementary heaters to keep the cranes warm. We plug them in every night, and hope they start in the morning. Some of the newer cranes also require thinner oil in the wintertime.
We service the cranes every 200 hours, which is not difficult because we now have more cranes than operators, so there are always cranes in our yard. Our operators can go from one crane to the next. They might operate three different cranes in a day.
There is strong demand for crane operators around here. It wasn’t until recently that New Brunswick required crane operators to be certified. We’ve pushed that for years-there are a lot of people that run a boom truck unsafely, and that makes the rest of the industry look bad.
This has made the province come up with training for these people. There is now a training course and an apprenticeship. It is unheard of that an operator gets in-classroom training before they are given to me. Crane driving is no different to driving a truck.
This is a joint venture of the union and the provincial government. We are unionized, but not everyone is. There are some job sites that require union operators.
The company has existed since November 1, 1995. It existed as Sandico Ltd for 25 years before that. Sandico had a trucking division and a crane division, and those two split. Brian Snow was the part-owner of Sandico, and became the sole owner of Capital. There are nine of us, and six operators, who are permanent employees, but they pay union dues.
Brian hired me to come in for one day, and it has been twelve and a half years. After the first day, he said, “Can you come back tomorrow?” The day after that, he said, “Stick with it as long as you can.”
I like it here. We have a good crowd, and we get along fairly well. I worked in a doctor’s office, and I figured if I can schedule a doctor’s appointment, I can schedule a crane. Actually it is trickier, because you have no idea how long the customer will keep the crane for.
We have a two-hour minimum on our cranes. For our least expensive boom trucks (9t, 14t and 17t cranes), the fee is CAN 100 per hour. We have some customers that will use the crane just for two hours.
There is a huge housing boom, so our boom trucks are raising a lot of roof trusses. Some contractors can lift all 30 trusses for a 48ft house in three lifts, and then we leave (they then slide them into place on the roof manually); at the next house the contractor will ask us to raise each truss individually and nail it in while we hold it.
Leona Foster, office manager
