Getting ripped in the new year

17 amazing GG Yorkies got very dirty whilst removing wetpour from a playground.

Wetpour is "a blended mix of rubber granules bound together, having been manufactured on site and laid on an existing suitable, or specially prepared base to provide a continuous surfacing free of seams or joints". Well that's the technical definition anyway. In reality, it's that green, rubbery tarmac that you find lining children's playgrounds so they bounce when they fall off the play equipment. It's very heavy.

Our task owner, Jenny provided us with wheelbarrows full of spades, shovels, loppers, saws and floodlights. She recommended lifting the edge of the wetpour so that we could then cut it with the saws to lift out in sections.

We immediately go to work. Soon there were cries of:

If you cut it a bit, then you can rip it!

Lizzie and Leanne had a go at tearing their bit to no avail. Max thought they were doing it wrong, so went over to help... only to find that our bit didn't tear quite as easily!

Soon, Team Tall (Max, Ed and Huw) were applying brute force to roll back, and tear out huge sections of the green stuff for others to cut into pieces that would fit into a wheelbarrow. Meanwhile, the rest of us (the ones without superhuman strength) went with technique and teamwork to neatly saw out smaller pieces at a time.

{WARNING! Technical jargon alert!} We soon found that underneath the green stuff, there was a thicker, but less dense layer of black stuff. We found that we could peel the green stuff away from the black stuff (making that easier to rip out) and the black stuff itself was then easier to break into small pieces and collect into bin bags. {/technical jargon finished}

Once half of the wetpour was out of the way, some of the gang got wheelbarrowing our spoils to the dumping point, and others started levering out the wooden border around the playground. Meanwhile, Bad Jim Max made himself a comfortable wetpour bed and had a nap.

After an hour of hard labour, we gave ourselves another 15 minutes to move all the waste to our dumping point which involved lifting many heavy bin bags and wheeling many heavy wheelbarrows a few hundred metres.

At the end of our time, there was still a tiny bit more wetpour to remove - After all, we wanted to give some of the other Yorkies a chance to have a go at this super fun task on another day...