Pipeline – trench 2011.05.19

Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Public holiday today for the few workers amongst us because of election day. This meant that Neil could come out to give us a hand with the latest leak.

On arrival we found Rob already hard at work digging in the pipe along the big drainage furrow from the N2, he had just buried the joint we wanted to tighten, no problem though. We then got the keys of the Fovs room and got a roll of pipe and made a  connection from the N2 to the wetland. While doing that I had left the roof of the car open and we had a visitor:

Off we went to our latest problem, the leak by the “washing line” and dug a trench uncovering the old plastic pipe up to where it was joined to the asbestos pipe. We didn’t have a new join so while Ellie and Neil went to Deon on the off chance that he might have one I prepared the join and fashioned a wooden plug to check if the remainder of the pipe still had leaks.

It was only partially successful because the prop didn’t quite fit so there was still some leakage but the meter was running a lot slower than last time so we hope for the best.

Lunch was had by the potting shed where Rob had joined Jenny to bag the pile of aloes which had been recovered from a building site and afterwards we decided to continue digging the pipe in where it was exposed across the track by the flyover.

Luckily the soil was still moist after the recent rains so the digging in the compacted soil was not too bad and we made better progress than expected.

Afterwards Neil went home and as the weather had turned quite grim we decided to call it a day and went for a walk along the river walk to admire Rob’s latest impressive digging in, soon the whole slope up will be protected which means only the trench section will be left.

Getting there!