Dirty Jobs

Mike starts off this episode at the abandoned campus of Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey. We meet Matt, his father Steve and brother Josh who run the family salvage company. They call their business "specialized extraction". You can no longer find the craftsmanship found at this college at an affordable price. They have 100 year old siding, doors, windows, bricks, tubs and toilets. The guys will salvage all of these items and sell them for a much lower price than you could find of this quality brand new. The bricks they're saving were made by the Sayer and Fisher Company who produced 6 billion, 250 million bricks over a hundred year period and used in about 40,000 homes.



Upsala College was a private college founded in 1893 that operated for 102 years. It is on 20 acres of land and has 24 buildings. The first cornerstone was laid in 1900. It closed its doors as a higher education institution on May 31, 1995. Many of the buildings here will be demolished and developed into middle income housing.



Mike and Matt first go into a building once used as a community house for doing arts and crafts. Here they are salvaging a bathtub currently being used as a toilet by raccoons. When the college was abandoned, transients moved in so their poo has to be dealt with as well. They go upstairs to get the tub.



Surrounding the tub are vintage subway tiles that they're going to try to save. They're worth a couple dollars apiece. They pound on one side of the wall to knock the tiles off. Problem is, they're not too good as catching the tiles and many break as they pop off the wall. They only take a few of the tiles off. They just want to get enough off to get to the tub right now and they'll get the rest of the tile at another time.



They knock out the wall, but need to go back downstairs to try and remove the drain. However, they still can't get to the drain so they go back up and drill into the walls and floor to try and get the tub loose. Mike gets to use a dangerous saw that uses a fiber blade. After a lot of work they finally get the tub loose. Getting it down the stairs and out the front door is another challenge.



They go back up five floors for a matching toilet. It is really nasty up there. The toilet has been used by transients and they have to bust out stuff from the ceilings and walls to just get into the tiny bathroom. The floors are rotten and Mike's afraid they'll fall right through. It's almost 100 degrees that day with high humidity and they're working up in an attic with a filthy toilet. It's so bad that Mike is left unable to speak.



After freeing the toilet, they go back outside and try to salvage a portico from an old dormitory that they'd like to fix up and reuse as a garden shed or pool cabana. The portico is bolted to the brick so they first need to cut out the lag bolts in the brick. Then they'll reinforce the inside of the structure. They're cutting through razor sharp mesh that's hanging everywhere. Mike's got cuts all over his skin from the pointy mesh. They pound nails into braces where there's barely enough room to swing a hammer. Mike begs for a nail gun which these guys don't have. Finally they've got it reinforced enough inside that Matt's dad, Steve, can come in with a machine to lift the portico up and out.



Next Mike is at Sharpe Mountain with Randy, a coal miner working in the Appalachian mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania. Randy tells Mike that here they mine anthracite coal which is harder and burns hotter than regular coal. Randy and Mike are sitting in a coal car. Ryan is the conductor of the coal cars and drives them down into the mine.



There's very little clearance in the tunnel and they have to duck down into the car so they don't bang their heads on anything. It's a cold day and there's icicles hanging down as well. Randy says at 2000 feet in there's still ice in the mine. Today they're going 2500 feet into the mountain. There are pipes on the ceiling that have compressed air running through them to power their machines. The tunnel they're in was blasted out with dynamite. There's a coal chute at every 25 feet of gangway.



John (Randy's son) is on the coal chute. Ryan drives the buggies up to the chute and they fill up the hopper closest to the conductor. Filling the buggies with coal and regulating the flow is called "tapping". There's four buggies and Ryan will pull back a car each time one is filled. Boo and Mark are up higher in the chute screening the coal so nothing too big comes down and blocks the passage.



Coal is formed from the remains of plants and animals under extreme pressure for millions of years. This mine was started in 1890 and produces 18,000 tons of coal each year. The world's coal consumption is 5 billion, 800 million tons annually. 75% of that is used to generate electricity. The average pay for a coal miner is $800 a week.



After filling all the coal cars, Mike goes up the chute to work with the screeners, Boo (John's brother) and Mark. This vein of coal goes all the way up to the surface. Mike has to break down the bigger chunks of coal so they don't clog up the chute. The hole the coal is coming from started with a dynamite blast which broke up the coal so it would run into the chute. The process continues for two to four weeks until the coal vein is completely worked out. In between trips they have to climb up the chute to make sure there's nothing too big to block the flow. Mike is sent up there and finds some large rocks, but Boo thinks that they'll come down just fine. Boo was right.



Boo's cousin Steve shows Mike how to drive the mucker. They're in the face of the mine which was blasted with dynamite. The mucker needs to dig out the solid rock so they can extend the tracks of the gangway. The bucket of the mucker lifts half a ton of rock and dumps it backward into a hopper.



After removing the rock, Steve and Mike then go make a new chute. They have a pneumatic jackhammer that runs 3000 rpm. It's much better than the old days when they had one guy hold a piece of steel while another person hit it with a hammer trying to drive through the rock. It took two men four hours to do this. Now it only takes one guy four minutes to get the job done.



They're drilling four foot holes into some of the hardest rock in the world called Pottsville conglomerate. They'll fill these holes with dynamite. Water is fed into the hole to keep the dust down and cool down the drill bit.



They stick the dynamite in the hole and tap it. In the old days, Steve says they used to go to the rock face and build a fire and keep it going for a couple days until the rock face got really hot. Then they would throw cold water on the rock making it break. Using a few sticks of dynamite is much faster.



Once the dynamite is lodged into the holes, they hook the wires on the dynamite together. They will attach more wire that will lead to a live wire. Mike is told to touch the wire to his tongue to make sure it's not yet live while he's attaching it. They go 600 feet away. Mike gets to push the buttons on the blasting machine. The blast impresses and also scares the crap out of Mike.