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.