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Kiwi housemovers doing hurricane-relief work in the US show their American counterparts faster and better ways to shift and elevate homes. They also help win an award for a move some said couldn’t be done. BY GAVIN RILEY
Chris Ellis and Murray Russell took their Alpha Specialised Movers company from Lower Hutt to Louisiana in the middle of last year to help in the massive clean-up required after the US$115 billion worth of damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina in the southeast of the state. But this restorative work, carried out in conjunction with leading Louisiana housemover Warren Davie, proved to be only one of their accomplishments. Ellis and Russell also: • Impressed the Americans so much with their team’s speed, efficiency and ability to move huge loads that they have found a ready market in the US for New Zealand-made trailers and jacks. • Won a major industry award by helping shift a giant school gymnasium some said couldn’t be moved in one piece. • Travelled to Mississippi to assist in transporting three big houses, a job no local housemover was prepared to tackle. • Used their skeleton staff in Lower Hutt and a subcontractor to carry out another job judged “impossible” – moving a chapel at Porirua. The Alpha team was based in Kenner on the outskirts of New Orleans, where Warren Davie has his company. Alpha’s hurricane-relief work involved helping Davie move houses and elevate other homes to a level deemed safe from future flooding so their owners could obtain insurance. Alpha also trained American workers in how to operate the three tri-axle trailers Ellis arranged to have made by TRT of Hamilton and shipped to Louisiana. The TRT hydraulic trailers have become so popular in the US that Ellis is in the process of selling three more – a three-axle and a four-axle with two axle-steering, and a three-axle with a single-axle tag, all made by TRT. Equally popular are the New Zealand jacks. Ellis took about 140 to Louisiana, and since returning home has sent over another 100 or so, with more to follow (he plans to display the trailers and jacks at an industry convention in Dallas, Texas, in January). “We had a crew moving houses and a crew elevating houses, and we really educated people over there as to what our gear could do,” he says. “Due to the New Zealand jacks and the speed we can elevate a building to four feet with them, we were elevating two buildings anywhere from four to 16 feet in a day – the average was eight feet – which was one more building that anyone else could do. “The methodology used by the Americans was slow in comparison to the way we could put our Kiwi jacks around the buildings, lift them up four feet, then put the steel and beams in and take them up to the eight, 10 or 12 feet required.” Warren Davie and Alpha earned TV documentary coverage for their single-day feat of transporting a new 125 square metre house 160 kilometres into New Orleans on a New Zealand hydraulic trailer and placing it on three-metre columns for a couple who had lost their home to Katrina. The documentary proved so popular that many viewers requested it be re-shown. The Davie-Alpha team also moved a 300 square metre, 100-tonne house in a suburb of New Orleans. The two-storey 1920s home, which featured a clay tile roof and art deco detailing, had to be cut in two to enable it to be hauled through narrow streets on two New Zealand trailers operating in tandem. The house had been bought by an investor group, which planned to renovate and sell it. More remarkable than either of those feats, however, was the Davie-Alpha achievement, in conjunction with an Iowa house-mover, in shifting a 70-year-old gymnasium a distance of about three football fields in a U-turn at a school more than 300 kilometres north of New Orleans. One US mover said it couldn’t be done. Another wanted to remove the building’s bleachers and locker rooms, then cut it into three sections. Only Chris Ellis and his colleagues said they could move it in its entirety. The 325-tonne wooden structure, 31.4 metres long, 13.7 metres tall and 26 metres wide, was moved on six dollies and a New Zealand hydraulic trailer. Two 225 lb/ft mains were used with nine 120-145 lb/ft cross-beams. Due to lack of space, 48 specialised Kiwi jacks and 12 US jacks were needed to raise the structure high enough to get steel in. A 12-jack ball-valve JSIS two-speed unified jacking machine was required. The massive job was completed in just eight days. “The gym was a lot heavier than we all anticipated, but the job went very well,” Ellis says. “We entered it in the annual awards of the Texas Association of Structural Movers, of which we’re a member, and won the category for the largest building moved on wheels.” Because of the New Zealand trailer’s capabilities, Davie and Ellis were being contacted by church and other community organisations which had houses to give to needy people but couldn’t get anyone to move them onto donated sites. The team travelled to Gulfport, Mississippi, where it moved three such homes, including two cottages nearly 90 years old. Before Alpha’s staff went to the US, Chris Ellis had looked at another “can’t be done” job, the relocation of Porirua Hospital’s chapel, and had told Kapiti Coast Health: “It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just how we are going to do it.” The move, which required extensive planning and windless Wellington weather, was finally carried out in February by Alpha’s remaining Lower Hutt staff and subcontractor Dean Jones of Independent House Movers at roughly the same time Ellis was helping co-ordinate the gymnasium move in Louisiana. The chapel project was entered in the recent Contractors’ Federation/Hirepool construction awards after being a category winner in the competition organised by the federation’s Wellington branch. The 40-year-old chapel featured a steeply pitched roof 10.5 metres high, a structural steel frame on a concrete floor, brick veneer walls, and beautiful stained-glass windows. The building’s large footprint meant the move had to be carried out in two parts. The main part was 15.5 metres by 14 metres, with the annexe about 10 metres by 10 metres and 3.5 metres high. The combined weight of the chapel including strengthening and bracing was 69 tonnes. Considerable work was required to ready the chapel for shifting by removing brick cladding and windows, bracing the building and cutting it from the existing foundation. Another foundation was prepared at the chapel’s new location 1.5 kilometres away. The haul had a tricky start and finish: down a 1-in-5 slope to the road and up a 1-in-17 incline to its new site. Though Ellis and Russell are back to moving houses in the Wellington region and are steadily rebuilding the development side of their business where they buy land, divide it up and move houses onto the sections, it is unlikely that Ellis, his Californian wife Sheila, their sons Tyler, 12, and Scott, 11, and Alpha’s six staff members and their families will ever forget their Louisiana experience. “We went there for 12 months, we had a blast, we did what we wanted to do, and we had a great year,” Ellis says. “But it’s not as easy as getting off the boat and just going to work. Just to get the insurance would kill you. Insurance over there is a horrific thing.” Moreover, Ellis had a head start over any foreign house-mover, Kiwi or otherwise, who might contemplate a stint in the US. In the early 1990s he worked in California for the US’s leading structural mover and one-time largest housemover; in 1999 he won an International Association of Structural Movers award in San Diego for Alpha’s shift of a 10-metre-tall hotel 60 kilometres across the Wairarapa; and in 2004 he linked up with Warren Davie to move 10 new modular homes 135km in the Houston area of Texas. What particularly pleased Ellis about Alpha’s US stay was the growing interest in Kiwi trailers and jacks that led to his returning home with sales orders worth $1 million. “We went over there purely with the gear we had and we thought we’d do 12 months and it would be good for everyone involved, and we’d have a bit of an adventure,” he says. “What I never really looked at, never expected – and I’ve been going there for 15 years pushing these trailers and jacks – was that only by seeing what we could do, the time-frames we could do it in, and the speed with which we could do things, only then did the Americans start to say, ‘Hey, maybe there’s something in this gear’. “Out of that [exposure], we’ve come away with these sales, which are only going to keep increasing.” Might Ellis work in the US again, given that the Hurricane Katrina clean-up will continue for years? “Definitely. We’ve already had two requests to go back, one from Warren Davie and the other from a housemover in another state who was very impressed by the attitude of the company, the guys who went there, how we did things and the gear we had. “But that’s all very easy to say,” he offers as an afterthought. “We’ve got a life here. We came back to a business that’s well established and well known. There is a risk [in working overseas] because we’ve got a huge amount of gear sitting here and a huge amount of infrastructure. “I guess it was really lucky that we got off the plane when we got back and away we went. “I hadn’t expected that to happen – to be so gracefully accepted back into the industry. I hadn’t realised the Alpha name had gained such widespread acceptance and respect.”
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Two New Zealand housemovers and their staff and families have returned from what lived up to its promise of being the working trip of a lifetime – a 12-month stint in the United States.