What kid didn’t want to play with a life-sized diggy-thing (aka an excavator)? I mean…even “I” am fascinated by the power that one of these things has and the (sometimes) short-work one can make of a landscape.
This one has been having a slowish go of things though. Last week they dropped most of the trees and started to excavate a layer of massive boulders. Eventually the operator announced that he’d arrived at bedrock and things would need to be blasted.
Some of us disagreed.
I walked out on the pile with the maintenance manager for the hatchery and we both thought that it looked a lot more like packed boulders held together with decades of compaction of soil and roots than it looked like bedrock. He figured they should have brought one of the pokey-things to swap out the diggy-part (clearly my words not his!) so they could loosen the rock and get to the bottom of things. Blasting next to the river is less than desirable.
A few days later and the remaining trees are gone from the copse next to the building and the “not-bedrock” is being pulled and scraped out boulder by boulder.
As much as I appreciate the work finally getting underway after such a long lead-up, I am also happy at the end of the day when the building stops shaking…..
One amusing thing is the fob-reader for the hatchery gate….I don’t know who did this, but they were clearly making VERY certain that it didn’t get damaged during the work 😂
