Week 1: Salvaging continues, Day 2

Salvaging continued for the second day. Machinery was top priority for day 1, so now the task was to remove everything else that looked like it was worth saving. Here is a view down to the shop floor from the office level where you can see how much has been cleared away.

Another view of the shop, with all of the machinery removed.

It is pretty obvious to say that the office level received a heavy blow (no pun intended)! The amazing thing is that a lot of our important paperwork and office equipment was saved. Things were looking quite the worse for wear as we went up to remove the computers, desks, chairs, etc.

The one sad victim of the tornado was our reference library.  Much of it was destroyed by water damage. Thomas had some wonderful old irreplaceable German reference books on furniture and cabinet making, handed down to him by his architect father, that have been plagued with mould and are beyond repair. It will be a sad day seeing these thrown away. 

A happier story in the office, and one that I find quite incredible, is that all of our computers survived, even after being out in the rain for 2 days. There was one monitor that was smashed, but all the other units were taken from the building in one piece. One of our computer towers, a Mac G5, fell from the 2nd floor to the ground, was left in the rain, and when we pulled it out, we plugged it in and it fired up right away. We were very impressed! You can see the computer as we found it, buried in the debris, circled in blue.

On day 2, the building inspector said that some of the remaining walls would need to be taken down, in order to make the building site more secure. So, in came a couple of high-hoes that worked in tandem to knock down the back walls of the shop. The ease at which the drivers move these enormous beasts is like watching some strangely choreographed ballet.

You can see how one of the buckets is supporting part of a wall (in the centre), while the other machine tears down the section where the overhead door was located.

The skilled operators managed to pull the walls outwards so everything that remained inside the perimeter was left unscathed by the demolition.

And here we are, the motley salvage crew from Day 2, all looking the part in hardhats and safety gear. Back Row (l to r): Dave, Milan, Jim and Thomas. Front Row (l to r): Ann-Marie, Richard, Martin and Robin (that's me).

Week 1: Salvaging begins, Day 1

Once we were able to assess the damage, the salvage operation needed to happen quickly. The building inspector, Brian Marcel, could have prevented us from entering the site due to safety concerns, but thankfully he let us go in and take out whatever we could. Thank you Brian!

Legions of friends and even some strangers joined in to help us take as much as we could from the building. Everyone scrambled to find hard hats, vests and safety shoes and certain friends improvised (you will see a bike helmet in there somewhere) in order to join in. We are incredibly grateful to everyone for their help and support. Here are some images of everyone in action.

Our wonderful neighbours at Johnson's Trim pitched in with their forklift and helped us get all of our machinery out of the building. A local truck driver, Ken Nelson, who we had never met before, stayed all day with his flatbed trailer and transported the machinery to the warehouse space we had arranged, donated very kindly by another local business, Interforest.

Here are Matt Johnson, maneuvering the forklift, and Ken Nelson, in the green jacket, moving our ripsaw. You can see the destruction of other neighbouring buildings in the distance.

Thomas and Matt discuss the removal of the moulder, while Ken waits by the loading door, his flat bed trailer filled with machinery, visible in the background.

We are still not sure of the state of all the machinery, but we think that a lot of it will be saved after some very thorough cleaning! We also managed to salvage some of our stock and materials, although items that got too wet, such as sandpaper, wood and tooling will have to be scrapped. It is hard to see things like this go to waste.

Week 1: Assessing the damage

The next couple of days were incredibly frustrating, as we were not able to gain access to the building site, due to the unsecure hydro lines. We knew all our machinery and supplies were sitting there, exposed to the wind and rain, and could do nothing about it. We were finally allowed back in on Saturday, two days after the tornado had come through.  Here are some images of what awaited our return.

The west side of the building as we approached from down the road.

The front of the building – both of our vehicles parked in front got badly damaged by falling roof debris.

Coming around the front - note the large cylindrical chunk of wood at the front which is what remained of the hydro pole at the front of our building.

The east side of the building looking to the rear of the shop and the remains of our spray booth and assembly area. 

The front bench area of the workshop. You can see work in progress such as a walnut tabletop and a cabinet that was just getting wrapped for shipping, as well as various routers and hand tools that survived the storm. 

Another view of the front of the shop and up to the office. The dark triangular space above the green door and under what remains of the wall, is where I lay down to protect myself from the storm. The wall fell down on top of me, but the cabinets on the right broke its fall. When I saw this again, it gave me shivers. I realize how lucky I am to still be standing!

A view to our back loading door and some of our machinery and wood supplies. You can see the damage to our neighbour’s roof in the distance. The corner of the building at the right of the picture is where our employee Mike crouched down when he saw the storm coming. Even though he said he could actually feel the walls lift up and down and saw the overhead door blow in, the corner remained strong and it was one of the safest places he could have been – another lucky choice!

Ground Zero: Tornado!

There are lots of challenges to face when running a business, but no one could have prepared us for the day when a tornado tore through town. On Thursday August 20th, our workshop was devastated by a F2 scale twister that did damage to the entire region. In only 15 seconds our roof was ripped off and the walls came tumbling down around us. Thankfully, everyone got out of the building safely, including me, from what remained of our second floor office. 

Here is our building, on a lovely sunny day in July.  

 
Here is an image taken with my phone about 3 minutes after the tornado hit. The ladder to the second floor was put there by my partner Thomas, who went back up into the office to rescue my laptop and our back-up hard drives, without which we would be lost. You can imagine how unhappy the emergency crews were when they saw that Thomas had re-entered the building. The hydro lines were down all around us, gas lines were broken and the area was not safe. They wanted us out of there ASAP!

You can read more about our experience with the tornado, and how it narrowly missed our house too, in this article from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

Welcome to our new blog

So we have finally taken the plunge and joined the blogosphere. We will be using our blog to provide you with updates on new products, details of special events and other news items of particular interest.

Why the name Small Talk? I thought it was a fun play-on-words with our name Speke Klein. The name "Speke" rhymes with "speak" as in "to talk" and "Klein" is the German word for "small"; hence "Small Talk".

Cheesy or fun? Let us know what you think.