Category: Update

Praise the Lord for the great men of Pacific Baptist! Many men have come out and the clearing effort is over half way complete.

• Our truck drivers, Ivan Esquivel, Oscar Torres, Sam Bonotan, and Daniel Lopez have helped us save thousands of dollars by driving our dump truck for us.
• In the last few weeks our men have broken, loaded, and hauled over 500 tons of concrete—that’s 1 million pounds!
• We have had an average of eight men come every day. A day hasn’t gone by without the Lord sending us hard working laborers.
• Hansen concrete donated three loads of base for free. We used this concrete to make a new truck entry onto our construction site.
• Temporary power is being installed today. We are just a few weeks away from removing the Edison poles.
• John Ellis from Ellis Equipment in Signal hill has agreed to assist us with our equipment rentals as well as volunteering to come to our site and give much of his own time to help operate the equipment.

We had a bid meeting with several companies that will provide us temporary power for our site.

• The bids came back and ranged from $56,000 to less than $8,000.
• Praise the Lord for Jeff Clark of Temp Power Systems as he will help us save money and work with us on this project.

We especially thank God for our dedicated group of men who have been working hard at removing, breaking and hauling the concrete.

• They have removed over 500 tons of concrete and debris.

A lady came by who needs several truck loads of dirt mixed with concrete to fill up her swimming pool.

• This is a blessing because there is much dirt mixed with concrete on the site that needs cleared that requires a lot of hand labor to separate.
• We do not have to separate it any more because she wants it mixed together.
• The best part is that she lives around the corner on the 33rd Street making it a very simple hauling job.

Our structural engineer friend, Fred Nour, has agreed to stamp and sign a collection of drawings that needs to be submitted to the Long Beach City Planning Department.

• He is working with us to save money.
• Donna Rallonza, Bobby Fabros, and Gerry Maranaan are working on our drawings, and Fred will stamp them for free.

Clearing work still goes on even during youth conference!

We had men show up every day last week to help run our equipment, hand load concrete, and drive the new dump truck.
We have dumped over 200,000 lbs. of concrete!
Donna R., Bobby F. and Gerry M. are also working on drawings that are required for us to submit to the city. (These drawings are not in our architect’s scope of work and their work is helping us to save money!)

Praise the Lord for Bro. Houghton from South Carolina who came with his wife. He paid for his own plane ticket, used his vacation time, and shutdown his business to help us with our demolition.

• He operated the excavator and completed the demo of the houses.
• We also removed the remaining palm trees.
• The demolition and salvage efforts were a great success. We saved tens of thousands of dollars on the demolition alone!

We were able to purchase a dump truck. This has already saved us thousands of dollars in rental/dump fees and will continue to do so throughout our building project.

Tal Neumann and Kevin Castanon have been putting in many hours on our project. Praise God for their dedication.

Many other men have come over the past few weeks to assist with our demolition and demolition clean up. We couldn’t do it without them!

We received the concrete breaker attachment and are plugging, removing, breaking and piling the concrete.

Oscar Torres is doing a great job with planning and scheduling our class A drivers. They are helping with the concrete hauling which began on Monday.

We are also gearing up to begin the main sewer reroute and the power pole relocation.

It’s here! We are moving quickly on the demolition of the construction area.

• The block walls around the site have been torn down.
• Jim Skaas gave us his backhoe to use throughout our project for free and also agreed to operate it—this will save us thousands of dollars.
• The construction fence has been installed.
• The salvage efforts of the houses have worked out better than we anticipated. This is saving us much money on dumping as well as meeting the city’s green building ordinance.
• We are in the process of finding a good dump truck for our construction.
• Many men have come to help with the clean up of the demo.

Please continue to be in prayer as we move on in our demo, grading, and soon construction of our new building.