WI NTER 2010 IN THIS ISSUE: FEATURES: Profile: Jack Lam.....................1, 6 RCABC’s ASM centre opens... 12 Asbestos’ deadly shadow....... 14 ASSOCIATION: President’s message .................. 3 RCABC takes safety award....... 5
THE VOICE OF PROFESSIONAL ROOFING CONTRACTORS
Vol. 7, No. 4 • WINTER 2010
Profile: Jack Lam From China’s gutters to Vancouver’s roof tops By Frank O’Brien
In the early 1950s a starving young Chinese boy and his sister begged on the chaotic streets of Guangdong province and dug up wild potatoes for food in the former battlefields around their village. With China’s victorious communists holding summary executions – including a man shot dead within feet of the children – the boy’s father sold him at the age of six to a neighbouring family that was fleeing the violence. A year later, in 1956, Jack Lam arrived in Vancouver with his adoptive mother, joining his new father who was already in Canada. Lam would never see his birth mother again, though she searched for him for decades before her death. Yet Lam, now founder and president of 30-employee Lam Metal Contracting Ltd., remains thankful, not bitter, about the sacrifice his family was forced to make in those terrible times. Many other children perished from starvation in the revolution’s aftermath. “Canada is a great, great country, a country of wealth and opportunity,” he said. Lam defines that opportunity. He began working construction in the 1970s after graduating with a diploma in Building Technology from the BC Institute of Technology. Soon after he was working as a junior draftsman for Westeel Rosco, which led him into estimating for metal roof decking, metal wall cladding and metal siding.
Jack Lam at the Burnaby headquarters of Lam Metal Contracting Ltd. Photo: Richard Lam
PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT NO. 40014608 RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO:
Roofing Contractors Association of BC 9734 201 Street Langley, BC Canada V1M 3E8
Founded own company Confident in his ability, Lam founded Lam Metal Contracting Ltd. in 1991 “at the back of my house in Burnaby.” As he modestly put it, “we gradually grew from there.” That is an understatement. Lam Metal was recently hand picked to provide the metal work on the Rise mixed-use building in Vancouver, which captured this year’s Urban Development Institute Award of Excellence for PCL Constructors. LAM continued on page 6
INDUSTRY NEWS: Steep slope roofers face more danger....................... 4 BC Place roof must leak .......... 4 PM backs solar roof innovations................................ 10 Roofing leads asphalt demand, despite prices .......... 10 Roofing Consultants elect Canadian president ................ 11 Below the roof membrane..... 16 HST could be killed...................18 CRCA issues chemical resistance bulletin .....................18 UDI picks top projects ............ 20 Housing starts to see modest rise in 2011................ 20 Vancouver green roof takes landscape award .......... 21 Metrodome roof collapses ..... 21 Auto-feed screw driving ......... 21 Towers to sprout in downtown Vancouver ............ 21 New Vancouver high-rises point to work ahead .............. 22 Pipe dreams in Major Projects inventory.................... 22 Football legend Joe Theismann keynote speaker ...................... 22 Building permits up ................ 22 COLUMN Legal Matters: Get your swagger back ......... 17
A very grand opening RCABC celebrates the launch of its Architectural Sheet Metal training centre in style. See pages 12-15
Asbestos still a clear and present danger Risky business: leave it to the pros. See pages 8 and 9