My place of employment is located in the Wolverine Brassworks building which, once upon a time, was a brassworks. Next to it is a foundry. They share an adjoining wall.
The foundry was still in operation when we moved our offices into the brassworks building three years ago. Sometime since then, it closed down. I imagine it had been in operation for some decades. And, being a foundry, I imagine most of it ha dnot had a thorough cleaning in that time.
This morning, a crew began demolishing the old foundry to make way for one half of a two-building, 20-story-tall hotel.
There were two pieces of machinery slowly crushing the building, looking much like dinosaurs foraging in a blue stone swamp. The smaller of the two machines had a thing like an enormous pair of bolt-cutters which it was using to tear apart the interior walls of the building.
The larger of the two had an attachment like the claws of an eagle or owl, and it was using this appendage to grab huge chunks of building and pile them for (supposedly) some other machine to load into a dump truck.
They started when we were in our Monday morning meeting. The first thing we saw was a sudden scattering of bricks, then a dinosaur-like head with a mouth-full of bricks looking for a place to spit them out.
Over the course of the day I began to notice a funny taste in the air, like standing on a road which has too much road-salt. And things around the office began to feel decidedly gritty. Given that the destruction caused huge plumes of black soot to cover the area, I can only assume that I have in me right now an assortment of chemicals which would make Union Carbide file for mining rights to my lungs.
And so it goes.