– August 7, 2020
Greetings reuse fans,
Our deconstruction crew and our job trainees from the South Hilltop Men’s Group (SHMG) have been working for the last two months on the largest salvage job in CJ history, deconstructing the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) simulated coal mine erected inside a 40,000-square-foot building that is part of the Ruff Creek training center campus. The simulated mine, located on a 64 acre site in Washington County, opened in 2009 with the purpose of training miners for jobs in area coal mines. As the coal industry entered a downturn in the last few years, the center’s mission is shifting from training miners for work in the mines to retraining them for other careers.
To repurpose the facility for training in other fields, the simulated mine structure which was constructed entirely of dimensional lumber and plywood, needed to be removed. Instead of demolishing the massive structure, the training center Executive Director, Clemmy Allen, called Construction Junction and asked if we could deconstruct the huge lumber labyrinth. Just to give you a quick idea of the size we estimated the roof structure alone contained over 1,500 2 x 10s, all between 14 and 16 feet in length! The “walls” of the mine (including the “shafts”) were made with plywood stapled to 2 x 4 framing.
Such a sizable undertaking for our crew has been a challenging job for us that supported a higher number of trainees from SHMG than we have previously been able to utilize. The job is an hour from CJ and we had a lot of staffing challenges related to health issues and COVID 19. But bringing in high quality dimensional lumber is a rare opportunity for us, let alone on this scale. We will have successfully diverted a significant quantity of lumber from the landfill. Buying reclaimed lumber from CJ is a way of showing your support for reuse and the jobs it creates at a very critical time for our organization. The sales revenue from this material helped to make future deconstruction jobs of this scope and the partnerships to accomplish them possible.
(UPDATE: All lumber from this project has been sold.)
When the job is complete we will report on the total number of training hours as well as the amount of lumber we kept in circulation! Our Deconstruction Manager, Brain Swearingen, is doing an amazing job of holding this all together. We appreciate the UMWA outreach to CJ to reuse this material, and as a result continue its mission of job training.
Reuse lumber is the greenest lumber you can buy!
Mike Gable
Executive Director
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