Рабочие проекта по благоустройству центра Лувеленда помогли пенсионеру починить электротрикол после поломки

Rick Denney, a retired construction worker, was riding his new e-trike from his home near the former McKee hospital through downtown Loveland to visit a friend south of town Friday when he ran into a sudden crisis. The handlebars on the trike, which he had purchased just three weeks earlier, suddenly disconnected from the wheels, and he was sent spinning. After a frightening few moments, he came to a stop, and encountered another frightening question: How was he going to get home? Denney can walk short distances with a cane, but his home was miles away, across U.S. 34. His wife didn’t answer the phone, so he was stranded alone on a hot afternoon. Fortunately for him, he had broken down at the corner of Fourth Street and Cleveland Avenue, near where work is nearing completion on the HIP Streets downtown revitalization project. He asked Adrian Yebra, construction inspector for the city of Loveland, if he had an Allen wrench, and even though Yebra didn’t, he went over to some workers from Zak Dirt, one of the contractors working on the project, who did. They managed to fix the trike’s handelbars for Denney, and before long he was on his way. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Denney said Wednesday. “These guys really helped me out. For a 70-year-old guy who can’t walk very far, that meant a lot to me.” Levi Goodroad, foreman for the project for Zak, and Joe Largent, project superintendent, happened to have some Allen wrenches, not typically used on the job but kept around just in case. Goodroad said that the crew is always on the lookout for ways to help the community, and that Largent stresses that his workers stay on the lookout for anybody who needs help. “He starts his morning meeting by saying ‘pretend it’s your grandma or grandpa walking down here, and take care of them,’” Goodroad said. There’s plenty of chaos that these workers see downtown every day, especially near a construction zone. As the workers were catching up with Denney on Wednesday, a car turned north onto Cleveland Avenue, a southbound one-way road. Largent stepped away to help the car navigate back onto a correct roadway. Yebra, for his part, had been on his way back from helping a woman load some furniture she had just purchased into her vehicle when he saw Denney needed help last Friday. Goodroad remembered a recent incident where Largent saw a teenager pop a tire riding his bike downtown. He loaded the young man’s bike into the truck and gave him a ride home. A few weeks later, when he saw the young man riding a skateboard and asked him where the bike was, the teenager said that he couldn’t afford new tires, so Largent went to Walmart and bought him some. Denney said that the small gesture meant a lot to him. Yebra didn’t have any tools on him, and was busy inspecting both the Fourth Street work and another construction project on the Bank of Colorado a block south. “He could’ve said ‘no, I don’t have any (tools),’” Denney said. “But he didn’t.” “That’s not me,” Yerba said. Denney was riding his trike again Wednesday morning, and now carries a small toolkit in the basket of the trike. “I learned my lesson!” he said.