DOCUMENTING STREET REPAIR
Hey viewers I wanted to reach out to every one of my loyal blog readers and some new readers. I worked many different jobs with my photography through the years, that opened my eyes to the possibilities of different jobs I can get. One of the main jobs that stuck out to me was the street construction job, the reason whyI found this one interesting was due to I got a chance to see firsthand how street repair is done in my city. Now as everyone knows, Philadelphia is the worse city ever when it comes to pot holes, uneven streets, and cracked streets that can leave your car feeling like a beat down boxer on hard times. I can go on and on about how many times my family along with friends who had busted tires along with other car repairs they needed done on their car.
I’ll talk about the job title I was given Photographic Documenter. My job was to photograph the streets being ripped up which is a part of the repaving processes, the name of this machine is called the Road Milling Machine. This Machine digs only street level not too far down to the point where we can see into the Sewer ways, the RMM (Road Milling Machine) has to work around sewer mains and drains. The construction workers on foot have to spray either pink of white lines on the ground to show where these veins are along with spray painting long areas where the RMM can be used at and where to stop at. Now I know what everyone is thinking, where the heck does all the broken street dirt goes? Well dump trucks are always 2 steps ahead of the RMM because it spits up all the broken street dirt into the back of the dump truck once full another truck replaces it. The last and final truck apart of the team is the street sweeping machine, this truck cleans up the street from left over flakes from milling.
Now that I gave you the system of how the processes works, time to jump forward to how it felt working with these hardworking men. Never in my life have I seen a large group of men work together like this doing a job common people like myself wouldn’t choose to do unless I had to. The masculine energy I felt from those men inspired me to want to work hard and look out for these men as I worked even though our task were totally different from each other. The foremen was a tough but cool leader that got things done. When he told his men what to do, they followed orders to the T doing things in a safe orderly fashion watching each other’s back in 100-degree weather. Most people don’t understand that the job these men do for our city isn’t safe, they put their lives on the line everyday taking on different task. The major problem these men have to deal with is the people of the community, the reason why I say this because I noticed when the RMM digs into the street if a curve is already broken the curve falls apart when it goes by it. A lot of people would put pressure onto telling them (you better fix this, cursing at them and more) which can lead to problems as they’re working.
Bringing things to a close the first processes towards repairing the streets, has been completed after sept 25th which was my last day of the contract. The second processes which is the street paving has been completed in OCT 2022. The city handled the cleanup work, I was very shocked how fast they got to all the streets I’ve done which was over 60 streets including main streets as well. I love that my work opens me up too many different jobs in photography, that being said no matter what skill you have their will always be many different fields you can tap into if there is a need for your talents. If you enjoyed this blog sign up for my newsletter and share my blog if you enjoyed, I have a bunch more blogs I will be posting so stick around!
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