It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater.
In the basement, under several inches of dirt, he discovered a brick floor pitted by the hot coals used to heat the house a century ago.
The most ambitious of the new Formula One circuits when it was inaugurated in 2004, it has two nine-floor pit buildings, a 29,000-seat main grandstand and paddock pavilions on stilts.
Lackeys and young bachelors milled about in the crowded and often boisterous parterre, the floor-level pit to which only men were admitted.
The Toronto jazz-funk trio christened the new venue Theatre Fairmont with their immersive, rebellious live arrangements and dance floor mosh pits.
Cast ingots, sometimes still hot, arrive at slabbing and blooming mills on railroad cars and are charged upright by a special crane into under-floor soaking pits.
Across the floor of the pit are hundreds of hovels, a sizable shantytown of dwellings made of plastic sheeting and scrap metal bound together with baling wire.
Instead they found support in each other, shunned the high-profile events, and climbed down the ramp to the floor of the pit, together.
"And this scratch in the ground here," he adds, gesturing to a long mark on the floor below the pit, "is where the dismembered legs will be.
Together, Mrs. Webster and her husband, Morris, took in the slurry wall and the tangle of equipment on the floor of the pit as it inched past.
