Some of my friends from the Nottingham Protest Drumming Alliance have an allotment. They inherited it from an old man who was struggling to manage it and had to let go, so it came with a full stocked shed, some large greenhouses, and all the glass you'd need to repair them (this is foreshadowing).
Unfortunately, a couple of months ago the shed got arsoned and burnt to the ground. This made a real mess, and so they called in the band to help out!
I came along to help, and spent a good few hours sifting through burnt-out rubble, finding a predigious quantitity of broken glass, plastic bags, and decades-worth of litter.
I found the whole experience really moving, to be honest, which is why I'm writing about it here. Because I am one of the few early-birds in this group, it was just me and Bug for quite a long time. We moved a lot of rubbish in that time and we sorted it into piles of scrap metal, charred wood, glass, and miscellanious plastic. Necessity required a container for "mystery liquids", too...
It was really educational seeing how different materials behaved after being through a fire, and being able to reconstruct where the fire had taken place, or tidbits about the man who had been here before us.
Materials
If I had to rank the materials in terms of clean up, it would be (best to worst)
- Wood: can be burnt (a second time) as fuel
- Metal: valuable to the scrap yard and reused
- Glass: can be recycled, in theory, and easy to pick out
- Platic: everybody hates plastic.
I'll be honest, I was already not a fan of plastic. Now I am even more not a fan of plastic. There were layers of soil, plastic (grow bags, construction fabric, random other bags) and crap about 40cm deep. The big plastic sheets got tangled around other things and took a whole-body heave to pull out. Older plastic shredded itself into little pieces and it was nearly impossible to fish them all out.
The man there before us seemed to have been a fan of collecting panes of glass, stacking them behind his shed, putting a big sheet of plastic on top to protect them, and then... putting soil on top? I'm not sure how else to explain the sheer quantity of buried glass we found. The ground crunched if you jumped on it. I'd estimate we removed maybe 300kg of the biggest shards.
The fire
We aren't sure how the fire started, but we could tell it burnt most fiercely in the "front" of the shed since that was where most of the damage was. Then it seems the shed collapsed and burnt on the pile of soil covering half a decade's detritus.
It was difficult to work out what, amongst all the things we excavated, had come from when the shed collapsed, or had been tossed aside and covered up decades earlier. I found some (empty) cans of lager, old mugs, a well-rotting pair of leather shoes all burried towards the back. It seems difficult to believe that was all inside the shed.
The man
Lover of glass. lots of meds (surprisingly well preserved). electronics,