April 23, 2009

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on Spirtas Wrecking Company, and on the quality of work that they did in the 2nd half of 2007 at the Big River Zinc Corporation (BRZ) refinery in Sauget, Illinois.

By way of background, as you know, BRZ is a temporarily closed zinc refinery, sited on 37 acres in Sauget, Illinois. BRZ stopped operations in March 2006. Prior to that, BRZ had produced about 100,000 tpy of zinc metal, with production equipment and structures dating back to 1940. In June 2006 BRZ was acquired by ZincOx Resources of Bagshot, England. ZincOx’ plan for BRZ is to convert it into a zinc recycling facility.

Your team immediately understood the complexity of the job and identified those items that BRZ had not identified in the job scope but that would require better definition for an efficient job. The items were discussed, and the questions were resolved efficiently.

When the actual demolition work started, it moved very efficiently. The site project manager (Ray Seaman) had full knowledge of the job and clearly had the complete respect of his crew. I personally was most impressed with your high reach operator.

He left the impression that with that same piece of massive equipment that he was using to cut large structural members; he could pick up a piece of paper off the roof. Excellent care was taken to isolate process materials from construction waste as described above.

The job went on schedule and there were no accidents. Communications were excellent throughout the project

Joel, I will sum up by saying that I was naive about demolition. In my wildest dreams, I never expected to be writing a letter such as this – saying that a “wrecking company” was one of the most professional, well run contractors that I have seen on this site in my 20+ years here.

If you or anyone else has additional questions regarding the job, please let me know.

Sincerely,

George M. Obeldobel
President – BRZ