This Year's Pictures.

[245dlc]

Thought I'd post some pictures from work I've been involved with this year. The winter pictures are from a utility company I was working for while it was so miserably cold last winter. The company is based in B.C. and didn't really have much of a clue how to work on the Prairie's we had numerous equipment issues as they wouldn't hire a proper mechanic and very little to no maintenance was done to the equipment if any of the machines made it to 2,000 hours it was pretty much shagged right out and was sent to Richie Bros. after.

 

[245dlc]

The fella with the Madonna bra was probably the hardest and best worker in the company and a very pleasant person and even he went back to working at a grocery store before the winter was over. The pipes in bottom of the trench are where the power lines, telephone, gas lines, and any other type of cable go through so we don't have to dig up the roads or directional drill under the road. We put everything in a common trench so almost all the utilities are installed at once and most of it is installed in the winter so as not to interfere with other construction work going on in the housing subdivisions. We also had lots of trouble with snow filling our trenches as most of our gas line fuser people had been laid off in the fall, likely so the company could train new guys and not pay the bigger wages of the more experienced personnel...unreal.

 

[245dlc]

One of the ways we rolled out pipe was with this home made device we were later told it wasn't rated for whatever weight load we put on it and wasn't considered safe....week later we were using it again as we hardly had any safe cable reel trailers. Some of the jobs if not most of them required us to plow back eight foot high snow drifts with no more than a tractor backhoe took me a week to clear a 200 foot long area and some jobs had over a 100 services.

 

[245dlc]

As winter faded into spring which took an eternity it seemed a friend called me asking if I had found any work as they had some highway related construction work which kept me rolling till September. Most of the work was ditching as June and July had been quite wet. I was really surprised how that the section of highway #12 I was working on only had 6" inches of A-base gravel under the concrete little wonder the concrete was in such poor shape.

 

[245dlc]

After I had helped dry things up on that job and finished some sub-grade excavation I was moved to a tricky job located really in 'gods country' where there is no cell phone communication and the closest town has a population of about 15 people and the surrounding country side is largely forest and cleared farm land. The tricky thing was that Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation wanted to use an old forestry road as a bypass for Hwy #12 while a couple of old rotten concrete bridges were replaced over the winter. Only problem was that this road which had existed for many years goes over a bottomless peat bog with springs that run 24/7 even through our harsh winters. So prior to my arrival on the job site my boss had been there for a month clearing beaver dams on an adjacent creek, replacing culverts and cleaning ditches. Some of the ditches had to be accessed from the back slope of the road, he had to knock down trees to make himself a corduroy road just to stay a float despite having 36" tracks on the SK210 he was using. At one point he took a 25' Black spruce and shoved it into the peat as far as he could and still didn't hit bottom!

 

[245dlc]

And after I arrived I still spent much of my time removing the peat curbs left behind from years of poor maintenance where all that was done to keep the road useable was peeling the grass off with a grader. Afterwards geotextile was rolled out and gravel was put down and compacted in lifts. The original road itself was actually a corduroy road just with clay and whatever suitable fill dumped on it. It was however still very soft and had settled into the bog over the years, I talked to my dad who is a retired Geo-technical Engineer said they should of also used geogrid to help cope with the semi-truck traffic that would be running over it. It was kinda neat when a gravel truck would pass behind me and I could feel the ground under me move like a wave and even move.

 

[ianoz]

Get the Bad out of the way , before getting on with the Good Bert .
.

 

[CM1995]

Those are some challenging conditions, glad I don't I have to deal with peat bogs.

Geo-grid is a good product, expensive but good. Thanks for the pics.

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . 245dlc. Interesting thread.

It is hard for me to imagine having to work in those conditions.

Nice piece of posting too . . . the way you did the block of text and then the pictures.

More please when time permits.

Cheers.

 

[245dlc]

Glad you guys like the pictures, working in the peat was most certainly a challenge but most of the time I was working from the road itself. Some of what I was required to do was pointless and didn't yield much for results. For example there was an old railway roadbed where my boss had cleared out some beaver dams and established a decent drainage ditch that helped keep the water away from the road. The ditch was working very well and no water was pooling up, the ditch ran into a creek but we couldn't connect the two properly because the highways department or as we call them "The Department of Holidays" didn't want to spend any money on silt fencing or any other erosion control products in order to make our ditches work properly. Also when you dig in the peat it's so soft that there is little to no resistance so it's hard to make a decent grade but with all the running springs any over dig is quickly filled in with eroded material so really I was digging for no reason and any over dig either filled with water and backed up, or filled up with eroded peat and made it's own water course.
We also had some brush from clearing the ditches to burn I was against the idea simply put because we were in a peat bog but Manitoba Conservation had given them a permit to do it and amazingly we didn't start a peat fire or a forest fire for that matter. lol

 

[245dlc]

So eventually we burnt all we could burn and it was time to play with water so we could go home for the day and get on with the job. That little water truck the main contractor had sure was a handy piece of kit to have all it needed was a remote control monitor but the side cannon worked quite well.

 

[CM1995]

I'm surprised to see a water truck on a site where one is fighting water. What's it's purpose, other than putting out fires?

 

[245dlc]

What I don't show in the photo's is the hole I dug in the peat to bury the stumps and ashes as we weren't suppose to disturb it for some reason. But we didn't want that stuff smoldering forever so what better way to put it out? Dig a hole that fills with water and backfill. lol A few days later they started laying out geotextile and A-base gravel I also started on resetting a number of culverts and took some pictures of some abandoned buildings in town. There use to be a more substantial population and several businesses including a bulk fuel station serviced by the CNR, a bar serviced by locals and young Americans from Minnesota as the legal drinking age in Manitoba is 18 and a number of other small businesses.

 

[245dlc]

I'm surprised to see a water truck on a site where one is fighting water. What's it's purpose, other than putting out fires?

Lol! It's purpose was largely for compacting the gravel as they put down probably a foot of material and compacted it in lifts also for dust control as it didn't take much sun for the dust to come out. I thought it was silly too but further up the road was all gravel escarpment and the conditions were the exact opposite believe it or not.

 

[CM1995]

Thanks for the explanation, I figured it was for the stone.

I thought it was silly too but further up the road was all gravel escarpment and the conditions were the exact opposite believe it or not.

LOL, I've been around long enough that nothing surprises me anymore.

 

[245dlc]

We reused most of the old culverts and replaced a few of the couplers as they were either rotted out or damaged as the bolts were facing up when I was digging them up. I usually put the coupler bolts down or to the back so they don't get snagged when being exposed. It was kinda neat digging in that area as all the wells in that area are fed under pressure from the natural aquifer in that area so no pumps or pressure tanks needed. So as we were resetting the culverts we came across a couple of abandoned water lines that had just been left to run. Little surprise why there was so much water in the ditches.

 

[245dlc]

We had one large culvert to replace as the old one was rusted right through, didn't take much to squish it and fold it up for later disposal it was replaced by one of the new black plastic ones which are much nicer to use than the galvanised ones.

 

[245dlc]

I took some pictures of how they were loading the tanker during some slack time it has it's own onboard p.t.o. powered 3" pump but it was easier to leave a Honda powered 3" pump by the creek to load it. And then I did some ditching and even found a baby garter snake little wonder there was one around with all the frogs and toads hopping around.

 

[245dlc]

I took a few pictures of the little guy he/she must of been a hatchling. And a picture of the peat bog they were trying to drain in a typical half arsed manner. We even offered to laser grade all the ditches to make them drain as efficiently as possible.

 

[245dlc]

I also made some more videos for my youtube channel from that job site I did a bit of work on the escarpment too but it wasn't as much fun as the bog. lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7PUquFNLPI&list=UUV3su6TSJuHdVybDvAeZg_w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3HRuylE6jE&list=UUV3su6TSJuHdVybDvAeZg_w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2b6EpvHG7g&list=UUV3su6TSJuHdVybDvAeZg_w