Description: Duraflake, or (Flakeboard), produces particle board in many thicknesses, and types. First, they transport left over wood from other factories by semi-truck, where the truck beds are lifted 90 degrees and shaken 120 feet in the air and emptied into a hopper, That spits the mountains of dust into a huge warehouse. From there the dust is refined into different densities, and then sent on conveyer to be pressed by a huge hydraulic press. From there the pressed boards are cut and packaged to be sent. There are many nasty chemicals used in the factory including fermaldyhide in the press, urea (a form of yes..urine), and numerous acids.
A Day in the life: With trucks dumping millions of pounds of dust in a room day in and day out, there is tons of dust that accumulates on the walls. This is were the clean-up crew goes up 120 feet in a manlift armed with a firehose, to wash down the inner walls of the structure. After the fun part, you get to scoop and push tons of muddy water that is now on the ground, to a vacuum truck that could literally suck your arm off. Well, after that three hour job, the hydraulic press needs some tending to. The production line pushes piles of dust throughout the mill until they reach the press where boards as long as an entire home deck is compressed at 13 at a time. The 80 ton steaming hot hydraulic press uses formaldehye during the process, so just being within 50 yards of the room that contains the press burns your eyes like mase. All the worse jobs involve the press whether above, or below. Below, in the "PIT" there are huge leaking press cylinders saturating a soupy oily dust/muddy mess that again has to be shoveled and vacuumed up a narrow flight of stairs 20 feet up. The top of the press, the dirtiest nastiest job of all time. Its in excess of 140 degrees, your dressed in full fire retardent overalls, armed with a compresed air hose. The formaldehyde gas has now quadrupeled in strength, the full face respirator muffles the burning, but the smell is overwhelming. The production runs non stop 24-7, except for the couple hours for this job in particular. After spraying at dust with an air hose for a good hour, the press room is fogged with dust, but the top of the press is cleaner, and ready for a new 1 foot layer of dust to collect in the next few days. You return in some sort of concrete suit because of the sweating on the inside of the suit, and the piles of dust covering you completely. You could not be any more completely dirty, and miserable after this job!
I have done alot of dirty jobs over the years. But I think the dirtiest job I ever did was. I got a call about a ceiling on the second floor caved in. when I went to see the job (now the house is 40 feet wide and about 60 feet long )I went up to the second floor and went into the room the ceiling fell in on. to find about 2 feet of pidgon poop. I went up the ladder to look in the ceiling there was about 2 feet of poop from one end of the house to the other and there must have been about 100 pidgons living in the ceiling. there was a 3 foot hole in the roof. I had to get all the pidgons out which wasnt fun. then had to fix the roof and take down all the ceilings in the house and clean up all the pidgon poop. It was the middle of the summer and must have been in the 90s. working for roto rooter was cleaner then this job
