Wednesday, November 27, 2019
It had rained all night, however, by the time we arrived back at job site, it was only drizzling and by 10 am it was sunny.
At the job site, we removed the tarps, installed a felt layer on the ground between the footings and Billy placed rocks on the water side of the bridge abutments.
This took a good portion of the day because the riprap ( large rocks manually placed for erosion protection ) consisted of very large and heavy rocks that had to be slowly moved by the excavator and the skid steer.
When the riprap had been completely placed below the footers, we started to place the 16″ beams on the footers.
By the end of the day we had placed all of the I-beams on the footers and secured them.
It had become windy in the afternoon and we experienced some large wind gusts, one of which knocked down a large tree on the hill close to the house with a loud bang.
Just before we left to go back to the campsite, a hydro truck quickly pulled off the road next to the bridge and disconnected the power by opening the switches on the pole. We soon found out why because shortly after we left, we were stopped on the road by a hydro truck that was directing traffic because a hydro pole had been knocked down and it was hanging across the road by its wires. We were only a delayed a few minutes and we continued our 30 minute drive back to the campsite and as we neared Clendenin, we could smell a lot of smoke and a little while afterwards we noticed a brushfire on the hillside.
The smoke was quite thick and we were again stopped by a hydro truck that was directing traffic, however, we were soon allowed to drive past the area. We arrived back at the campsite by 5:30, cleaned up, ate supper and chatted for a while before going to bed.
As we were chatting, the power cycled off and on, a few times, until we heard a load bang and a bright light near the campsite and the power stayed off. Wieland and Esther walked the short distance to the area where the sound had originated. It appeared to have come from a hydro pole along the road and the power lines had been torn apart.
It was an interesting evening.
Ralf Hamm 