Garberville - Day Four

Finally the regulator gave good advice, and we finished. I got home last night abut 7:00.

Home.

So nice.

Garberville - Day Three

We were all set to be done to day, but we ended up being slowed by my old nemesis; government bureaucracy.

Part of the problem was the delay from our prime contractor communicating with their office and then to the regulator. I feel they should have been more proactive and getting options from the regulator for possible choices instead of just slowly feeding information and waiting for a response at each step.

What ended up happening was that we got our results and had to wait for the regulator to discuss with their supervisor on what to do. Had this been my project I would have immediately given several hypothetical situations to the regulator and had possible solutions.

Instead, we got stuck here for one more day as the regulator didn't get back to us, and then disappeared at 3:30.

I'm a little pissed off.

But see the previous post for volcanic shockwaves that helped me relax.

Garberville - Day Two

And today, it rained.

Most of the day it rained, and most of the morning it poured.

We got a lot Done though. All the locations on asphalt were completed by lunch, and we got one location done off the pavement. The hangup was off the pavement we had to make four attempts to get to depth and get the samples we needed.

It turns out we have vertical delineation (samples that show a drop-off or complete lack of contaminant), and now we are waiting to see if we have to do multiple water samples.

So tomorrow will be step-outs in the cardinal compass directions from the original location, and possibly water samples, but we'll see.

We're thinking about a 4 in 5 chance of being done tomorrow.

Garberville - Day One

Today was a long 4 hour drive from Pleasant Hill to Garberville, which I must admit I was unable to remain awake for. I apologized repeatedly to my coworker, but I kept falling asleep.

Once we were at the site, things went fine. We located the boring locations, recorded water depths in groundwater wells, and the drillers arrived to core to asphalt and concrete.

The concrete was the only problem. Most of the asphalt was between 2 and 3 inches thick. In contrast we had two locations in concrete. One ended up being only 9 inches thick. I say "only" because the hole prior was 14 inches of concrete including an encounter with index finger thick rebar. it took the drillers four attempts to get through it.

Tomorrow (in the predicted 90% chance of rain with over an inch expected), we will begin our drilling for soil samples.