Pipeline – all the way 2011.06.04

Friday, 3 June 2011

Another trip to Van Stadens, this time to connect the final piece of pipe to take us all the way to the storage tanks. We first had a look how the trench had been filled in, a rough job with the frontloader but at least it is covered. We wanted to give the pipe a good run before Sunday’s official switch-on but we couldn’t very well let the water flood the nursery so we led the pipe into the pond at the rockery, turned on the stopcock at the old nursery and then off to the main valve to turn that one on.

We first took a reading of the water meter so hopefully we can do another reading on Sunday and see how many litres we can get per day and then opened the valve and cleaned out the manhole and the rim so the cover fits properly again before zooting of to Gibson’s to collect all the bits and pieces of pipes etc that were littering the landscape, this is the result:

a trailer full of assorted asbestos pipes and such like, I guess this means a trip to the municipal dump sometime.

Back to the Reserve to see if the water was filling up our little dam and lo and behold, water rising:

A small pool was forming, we noted the level on a rock and went and rolled out the remaining pipe in anticipation of Neil’s arrival, admired all the seedlings in the nursery, they are doing very well and decided it was time for lunch. What a glorious day it was, out of the wind and in the sun, reluctantly we went to the old nursery to install the manhole cover we had retrieved, got a phone call from Neil saying he had arrived, installed the pipe in the trench and then just sat around the pond with big grins on our faces admiring the result of so many weeks of toil.

It was filling up fast, soon the rock will be submerged, lots of banter about skinny dipping but no one was foolhardy enough so we left it to fill overnight. On the way out we popped into Wesley’s office though to warn him that the pond might overflow and that he could close the stopcock by the old nursery if he wanted. then, one last look….

and back home again.