As the rain slowly ended this afternoon, Jorge Maldonado backed his pickup truck onto the sidewalk at 7th Street and Hunting Park and began unloading shovels and tools. With the recent rain, Maldanado was worried that he would not be able to finish the job.
“I hope it doesn’t continue to rain. Cement and rain don’t mix well,” he says.
Maldanado came out at the urging of a friend and the owner of the Multi-Purpose shop on the corner, Maria Fuentes, who needed the sidewalk repaired. He came equipped with cement bags, shovels, and three friends to help get the job done only thing left was, the weather, which has not really been on his side.
Maldanado says, “It’s been raining for the past three days. It makes it hard to get work done, outside work done while it’s raining.”
One of the workers, Carl Johnson, wastes no time dragging the bags of cement powder off the bed of the truck and gets the bag open and ready for the water. The men band together to mix the cement. Two grab the end of the bag and begin pouring it into the large crate, while another is adding the water, and Jorge is mixing it evenly so that the mixture doesn’t become too thick or thin.
“Good thing the concrete was already broken up. All we had to do was move a few pieces but most of it was gone,” says Johnson.
Jorge assures his team that the soil underneath the old concrete will not mess anything up simply because it is wet from the rain. As they being mixing and pouring, the clouds continue to roll in. The only thing they can hope for now, is that the rain hold off long enough to get this Quick Crete hard so that at least a day of work and three bags of Quick Crete is not wasted.
Whitney Crawford, Group 28, Hunting Park
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