The RTH Rebirth

by Dawn Lyons

Steven Metcalf, P. Eng
Employed by: Ellis Don as project manager
Current project: Roy Thomson Hall Enhancement Project 2002
Next project: Oshawa General Hospital
 

I tell the little brown box on the post at the parking lot behind Roy Thomson Hall that I'm doing an interview.  The box responds, "We have a show on, there's no parking here."  Oh well.  It's the first day of the Royal Bank Seniors' Jubilee, there are buses for blocks along Wellington Street and there are seniors everywhere at Roy Thomson Hall.  When I talked to Glenda Richards of Richburn Productions, the Jubilee's producer last spring (see May 2001 WholeNote) she had told me there were 1,300 performers.  This should be quite the shakedown show for the newly re-opened Roy Thomson Hall.  Den offers to stow the van while I start the interview. I wait at the security desk for my contact,  Jack Kado.  He's RTH's publicity manager and he's arranged for me to talk to the project manager for the hall's acoustic makeover.   I can hear the strains of Stars and Stripes Forever coming from the Hall.  I imagine a nonagenarian baton twirler.

A dark, distracted-looking man approaches from the direction of the admin offices, hand extended.  "Hi, I'm Jack, and that's Steven...".  A tall red-haired man enters from the parking lot, shakes my hand real fast,  says something about a banner, and keeps on going.  Jack, trouper that he is, plies me with construction statistics and budget figures until Steven reappears.  We try again. "This is Steven Metcalf of Ellis Don,  he is the project manager.  His office is in the trailer out in the parking lot.  Did you want to talk to him there or in the auditorium?"

Me: Would the trailer be OK?  I see you have seniors in the auditorium.

Jack looks at me, wide-eyed, "They're everywhere!"

The trailer is wonderful.  Wood-grain panelling,  plywood pigeonholes with curled-up plans, a four-drawer metal file cabinet, wall calendar complete with calendar girl.  Steven gestures at a folding table with a telephone, a can of Pepsi and a laptop computer on it.  "That's my desk."

Me: Now, as I understand it,  the acoustic consultants -  that would be Russell Johnson and Damian Doria of Artec Consultants Inc. of New York - decide what needs to be done, then the architect - in this case Tom Payne of  Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Toronto -  decide how it is to be done, and your job is to actually get it done, have I got that right?

Steven: That's about right.  There was a design and development phase, a lot of consulting. Ellis Don has been involved for years, there's budget stuff and proposals (he indicates a high shelf with eight or ten strip-bound books piled on) from way before I started.

Me: I remember Jack telling me that planning started in 1995. When did you start?

Steven: April 2001.

Me: So, how do the plans get translated into reality?

Steven: (offers me a strip-bound book about 1 1/2" thick)  That's the project specifications, they go with the architectural drawings.  He flips it open to show me a table of contents.  Everything is broken into 16 categories, that's standard for the construction industry.

(He shows me a page, there are maybe a dozen categories with numbers, like Carpentry 5800, each with several sub- categories, also numbered,  listed below it.)  Everything is in here.  From this I prepare the tender packages.

Me: (confused)  Tender packages?  Haven't you already got the contract?  Oh ... (I blush), for the contractors to tender.

Steven nods:   I make up one for every trade or contractor.  It has in it what we want each contractor to do, and each one also gets a general package, with general things like hours of work, time schedule, site set-up, bond requirements, everyone is responsible for their own overtime, if you hold someone else up you have to pay their overtime -  things like that, and a set of the plans.  The time schedule is the most important thing here, everyone has to keep to the schedule.

(He opens a fold-out page, a colour-coded plan of the hall under construction.)

Here is the scaffolding, there's the garbage, here are the washrooms, the mobile crane... .

Me: So you just break down the packages by the trades?

Steven: I change them around, if it makes better sense.  For instance, structural steel and miscellaneous metals are usually two separate things, but there are some places here where the structural steel is attached to other metals - the canopy and where the stairs meet -  so I put that in the structural steel package, because it's so integrated.

Me: So the structural steel guy would do the miscellaneous metal?

Steven: No, he'd still sub to a miscellaneous metals guy for that part, but he'd be responsible for the whole package.  And I'd have a miscellaneous metals package as well, for the rest of the metal stuff.

Another place like that  is the glazing, I put that in the package with the window framing.  He'd sub it to a glazier, but when it's in the window package I know that the installation will be done right for those particular frames.

Me: So all these things are let out for bids?

Steven: Well, some are, but for a lot of the work we have preferred contractors we know and we like to use them.  Where we hadn't worked with someone before we checked them out - we visited the guy who is refurbishing the seats, we went out to the shop in London that did the bulkheads.  As the project managers Ellis Don is responsible for everything and with the tight schedule we didn't want to take any chances, we couldn't afford the time to fix any mistakes.

Me: How tight was your time schedule?

Steven:   The hall was dark for 22 weeks, originally 20 but they increased it to 22, March 10 to August 13.  During that time we worked 24 hours a day, steel guys had the crane from 7am to 3pm, wood guys had it from 3 to 11, and the demolition removal guys had it from midnight to 7am.  We had several milestones, which were somewhat flexible, but the last day - that never changed.  August 9.

Me: With this big a job and this small a window, I guess you did a lot in advance?

Steven: Oh yes, everything we could.  We built models.  The tenders, as much as possible, the materials.  The meetings,  the site visits.  We had a big warehouse in Mississauga, we used that to assemble two of the bulkheads,  for the architect to approve the finishes.  That would normally be done on the construction site but we did it there because we didn't have time in case he didn't approve it, and it also gave us a chance for our people to work out the procedure for installing them.  (He meditates.)  We were really lucky with that warehouse, we needed 40' overhead clearance for the bulkheads.  We assembled the canopy there, too, to make sure everything worked.  We made a couple of changes, we added some braces to the hoists to deal with the rotation and changed the light troughs.

We did some of the on-site work in advance, too, before the 22-week dark phase. We had a "pre-dark", that was October 13 to March 9. We did preliminary work between midnight and 7am during that period.  We worked in the attic putting in three layers of structural steel to support the new canopy, it weighs about 50,000 pounds, and a washroom for the workers, way up there.

(Clicks on his laptop.)

Here's a picture.  And before that there was pre-pre-dark.

Me: Pre-pre-dark?

Steven: Some of the work was done by RTH before we officially became a construction site, we have some union issues.  So they built the counterweight shaft, that was an enlargement and extension of a stairwell that went into the parking garage under the hall, to house the 100,000 pound counterweight for the canopy.

(Steven smiles with pride)

We started on Wednesday March 13 at midnight.  That first night we took out the stage, started on the seats and rigged the sling for the oculus.

I hazard a guess: That was the thingy on the ceiling with all the discs sticking out of it?

Steven nods.  The next night we finished the seats and dropped the occulus using 12 electronic hoists, all co-ordinated.  It hit the stage at 3:30am.

(Another photo on his laptop, it's the oculus on the stage, looking like a downed UFO.)

By 7:00am it was cut up and removed.

Me: Cut up?

Steven: Yes, everything that went into or out of the hall went through this door.

(He flashes a photo of a very ordinary double door onto the screen. "It's six-foot seven inches," he says with quiet satisfaction.)

I boggle.  You have a 38 tonne canopy in there.  You have 23 huge wooden bulkheads.  You had a mobile crane in there.

Steven flashes another picture on the screen.  The same doorway is absolutely filled with I don't know, yes I do, It's the body of a crane, on its side, with no wheels.

Steven: Right, we had to dismantle everything, in and out.

Me: How do you keep track of everything?  I don't see a lot of paper, so must be the laptop?

Steven: Right. We use EDgeBuilder7, it's Ellis Don's own, the programming is done by our information manager,  Bruce Fleming - he's a Waterloo graduate, too.

(Steven clicks up a screen with squares and boxes and tabs across the top.)

It's similar to Microsoft Project, based on Lotus Notes, but especially designed to manage construction projects.  It's web-based and includes a webcam.  The camera was installed at the top of the hall and had electronic telemetry, any of the authorized users could aim the camera wherever they wanted to see any angle of the work, live.  All the plans and specifications are available to them, too. (Steven clicks on tabs.) Here, minutes of meetings, supervisors' daily field reports, schedule, specifications, change orders, RFI's, photographs of various aspects of the work, and I can track anything, too.

Me: RFI?

Steven: Request for information.  Here's one. He hasn't gotten back to me on that one, I can follow up. (Click, a reminder e-mail goes out.)  It's instant and the information is available to everyone involved... .

Me: So, if the hall's done, why are you still here?

Steven grins: We moved so fast that sometimes the work got done before the paperwork.  There are some deficiencies and extras - Cesaroni the drywall contractor,  there is a ceiling that wasn't in the original package, that sort of thing.  I'll be here until September, my next project is in Oshawa, I'll like that, ... closer to home.