St. Michael Missions Trip Pt. 6 Heavy Lifting

One of the more significant tasks we undertook on this trip to St. Michael was fixing and leveling the floors in the house and the quonset hut. We were totally unprepared for this but it became very obvious this is something that needed to happen.

Right off, walking into the house it was very obvious that the floor was not level. A check from the front of the house to the back proved that the back of the house was 9" lower than the front end. Putting any work into fixing cracks in the walls or trim would be an exercise in frustration if the house itself wasn't level.

This is where our leader, Dennis really shines. One of his greatest strengths is that he is an amazing problem solver. If it had been left up to me, my assessment of the situation would have been, "hmmm....that's too bad." Not Dennis. No matter we did not have 10 ton jacks with us on this trip. No matter we didn't even have a real level - ever hear the expression, "that level is half a bubble off of plumb"? That was our level. No matter this project wasn't even on the radar screen when we took off to St. Michael. Dennis plunged right in and set about finding a way to make it happen.

Over and over again it was so obvious that the Lord provided things we required to do work that we would just be astounded. So it was with the jacks. A "chance" meeting with one of the residents of St. Michael resulted in him supplying two heavy lifting jacks for us to use. Once our electrician, Jim was working a rewiring project and couldn't go any further because he needed two romex clamps. They couldn't be found on site, at the AC or in the next village, Stebbins. So, Jim went to look again, through the bits and pieces of salvage material we had saved to see if he could make something work. Just as he exited the church building and was crossing the "street" (not really a street) he intersected with one of the village residents and greeted him. He mentioned to him what he was looking for. The man said, "I think I have two of those at home." He was gone for about 10 minutes and came back with three. That sort of thing happened so often we realized how involved the Lord was in this trip.

So, Dennis assigned Ray and Mark to crawl under that dank, dark space under the house to begin the process of jacking up the house. The house has been there for about 30 years. There are no true foundations under houses in St. Michael. Because the ground is so saturated in water, there is no practical way to pour a conventional foundation, neither is there any way you could get enough affordable concrete to St. Michael to make it possible. So, all the house are built on pilings. Over time these pilings sink into the soft soils during the short summers. As I mentioned the back of the house was sinking faster than the front of the house, most likely because it receives far more of the sun. So, Ray and Mark worked most of one day jacking and stacking more piling material under the floor support beams until the house was pretty much level. Inside the house this made an amazing difference. Walls that were separating came back together, cracks disappeared and you could walk across the room without feeling as if one of your legs was shorter than the other.

The next similar but different project was the quonset hut floor. This being the original building from the early '60's we assumed wrongly that the floor was rotted out. Not the case. What a testament to US Army engineering. It was quite solid and sound despite being inches above the watery ground for decades. What had happened, was on a previous construction project, the building materials were stacked in the quonset hut to be stored until they could be used. It obviously exceeded the weight limit of the floor and broke the main beam, collapsing the floor. So, once again, Dennis decided this had to be fixed.

They opened up the floor, quickly seeing the problem and went to work. They put treated blocking under the broken beam to use as a base to first jack up the floor. Once they started jacking it was obvious that the floor was not going up as expected, but the jack and the blocking were being pushed down into the watery ground. Another layer of treated blocking (all this blocking was found laying outside the church building, obviously there for some time) was required before the upward force was greater than the downward force. Once the floor was leveled it was supported and repaired and the floor sealed back up. It now will become a youth and children's ministry center instead of an unusable building.