s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Bridge!

Between September 6th and 9th our old bridge was torn out and replaced by a spiffy new culvert. I had fun watching and helping.

This is what we started with. Rotting. Collapsing. Bits in the stream beneath. Not a good look. It was probably built ~1973 by the Freemans, who built the house we live in. It was build of found items. I beams, heavy wooden sleepers, railway iron, you name it.

Conrad made short work of it with a 14 ton digger. He is very skilled with that heavy equipment, and made it look easy.

With the deck off we could see just what a shocking state it was in. And we’d been driving over it (veeery slowly, and veeery carefully) for 18 months. We could really see how the high-water in June washed out under the west side of the bridge, there was really nothing left supporting that side (which explained why it was sinking day after day). It was also much more clear how very non-parallel the main support beams had become.

With that done it was time to put in the diversion. The consent had originally called for pumps to divert the stream, the problem was that all the big-bore pumps are still busy down in Christchurch (all the EQ aftermath). Conrad brought in a pair of pumps the week before, and they were not up to the task, so plan ‘B’ was to divert the flow with a small culvert.

The one risk in doing this is knowing where the pipes are. 15m to the east in the main gas main for Wellington. We weren’t sure exact where the water main lay, though. GWRC came out and marked it- turns out it only runs less than 3m from the western edge of the bridge. So, the culvert went down the east side.

The broken down bridge structure came out next. All that mess had made it into a veritable eel motel. I ended up on eel-patrol, standing next to the site watching the waters. When I spotted movement I would stop the digger, leap in, and rescue an eel (and once a fish I mistook for an eel). In the end was saved 6 eels, 2 largish, 3 medium, and a little finger-thick one. Nice to see them doing well, as they are on their way to being threatened. We should start feeding them.

Once the old bridge was out they prepped the site (sculpting the approaches, a layer of drainage metal underneath), and the culverts went in. Each culvert weighed 7.2 tons, so they needed a grunty Hi-Ab truck to lift them into place, since the 14 ton digger would have had trouble.

At the end of the day they had the culverts in place, and temporarily back-filled so Tam could drive across and up to the house. The cattle grid was also supposed to go in that day, but in a snafu typical of this whole project the cattle grid had somehow been left in New Plymouth. They promised it would be in the next day.

The next day was spent making the concrete-sack filled abutments. The Hessian bags were filled with concrete mix (dry), and stacked in place and secured with rebar. Natural moisture (and rain) helped set them all up in a few days. I spent the day helping. Mixing, filling and stacking 200 x 35 kg bags is a goodly amount of work. I ended up in the part of the work chain where I hauled the newly-filled bags down to the work site where Conrad stacked them. He had brought in some extra hands for that day’s work. With most of the bags in place we opened up the stream at the end of the day, and let it flow back along its natural path.

Then it was time to get the cattle grid in. They ended up sending up a much nicer cattle-stop than the one specified on the plan. I’m not complaining. Made of cast concrete, each piece weighs 2.1 tons. I mentioned how massively over-engineered this whole thing is, right?

When they were done Conrad sculpted everything into place. It all looks lovely. The spray-grass (hydro-seed) people should come soon, to cover the areas that got churned up and re-graded. While they were here, I had Conrad re-grade our washboard drive, and put 20 tons of fresh basecourse down on it.

Now we just wait for the fencer (should be next week) and then we are back in business, with a 1000% better bridge. Highway grade. 13 tons per axel. What hilarious overkill.

Went to the 2011 WOW Awards last night, and was quite pleased.

To those who are going, or who are planning to go, we highly recommend binnoculars. Being able to see the materials, composition and details of the costumes is key. Otherwise many of the works might just evoke a “huh?” from a distance.

Like previous shows the parading wearable art was interspersed with song and/or dance routines. Sometimes to provide color and movement on stage, sometimes to bridge the costume and set changes.

You gotta love it when one of the dance troupes was the Royal NZ Ballet. (Not to ignore the NZ School of Dance or the Footnote Dance troupes). There was also some fantastic Opera (Aivale Cole and Ben Makisi).

What really broke my head was the final “Kiwiana” section of the show. (This came right after a lengthy Ballet/Operatic section.) There was the sheep dog. And the little herd of (extremely calm and tame) sheep on stage. All at the bach on the shore. Then came the dancers in Gumboots and Swandris. And the Wizard of Christchurch. And a Kapa Haka troupe. And the picnicers handing out pavlova to the audience while the blokes BBQed behind them. And them the big final dance routine where everyone was wearing jandals. A wonderful, over-the-top, brain-breaker to end the show. It was also really quite lovely, and well choreographed.

While we didn’t agree with all the winners (we never do).

Yay! We did local culture stuff!

Last night I finished the first draft of “Blindspot”, my first novel.

At 172,000 words it came out longer than I was expecting. And considering that my first-read editor (Tam) keeps wanting me to add material (my prose, especially early-on, was painfully sparse) I can only expect the total will grow a bit.

Currently I have no sense of exultation, or anything of the like. That might be because I know I now have a few frenetic weeks of editing and rewriting ahead of me. No time for slacking off.

Then a draft goes out to my first lucky outside readers. When they are done I will visit them in their new institutional homes and endeavor to gather reviews from their newly-mad ravings.

Gotta get this one done, so I can start on the next!

Edit: The plan at this point is to edit like mad for the next ~2 weeks, then an early reading-draft goes out to about a half dozen volunteers- people who I know tend to devour books quickly. Based on their feedback I engage in another round of editing, then hopefully a second round of different reader reviews. I have the semi-hard deadline of September, which is when I told Delia I’d have a readable draft for her.

There hasn’t been snow like this here in at least 30 years.

…I made a useful observation on Friday.

You can park your car in front of Dairy, right off SH1 at mid day, and transfer a body wrapped in a bloody sheet from one car boot to another.

Easy, no problem, and you won’t get a second glance from anyone around.

In this case it was a freshly homekilled big for spitroasting at today’s party wrapped in the sheet, but you certainly couldn’t tell that from a distance.

Just an observation, you know, for the future.

So, for those who have not heard the saga of our bridge, time for an update.

We have a small stream running through the front paddock, about a meter wide. Takapu Stream. The bridge that goes across it is not very large, and is a somewhat ramshackle affair having been built from this-and-that over the years. Hardwood sleepers, I-beams, railway iron, all capped by 55mm steel tubes acting as a cattle-stop.

Back last January 2010, Transpower was pouring new concrete footings for 66kV line, these are the smaller steel pylons that date back to the 20′s or 30′s, and were installed without concrete, just stuck into the ground. As our bridge is nowhere near “engineer certified”, they elected to bring in a big tracked concrete mixer which would meet the concrete trucks down at the road, ford the stream, and take it up to the site via the farm tracks (check out the photos from the Jan 2010 blog posts to see the big yellow moster)

Problem is, one of the concrete truck drivers didn’t follow instructions, and took his 22 ton truck across the bridge.

A week later, we noticed the Vitz bottoming out when driving across. Uh-oh. The southwest corner had dropped about 10 cm, and the big concrete bastion in that corner had cracked through and was pulling away. Time to call the contractors. They agreed it was their problem, and they had to fix it.

Enter plan A- jack up the bridge, pour a new footing in that corner. Their contractor came in, and upon examining the bridge and the plan, refused to do the work. In his words “either the bridge will fall apart when I jack it up, or I will finish the job, and it will fail in a year or two, and I will get the blame.” I had to agree with him. It was a dumb plan. Cheap, yes, but dumb.

In retrospect what they should have done is pulled out the old bridge with a digger, poured proper concrete bastions on each side, and dropped a pre-cast deck on top. Could have been done in 2 or 3 days of work. But no, they had to try and do it the legal way.

Takapu Stream is a named watercourse. So they needed a resource consent to go with the building consent. And engineers plans. And a hydrological assessment of the 50-year flood flows based on the cachement. Oh, and add an accurate GPS survey of all the land within 100 meters. Time consuming, expensive. We got a copy of the consent, very informative. But the whole process ate many months.

The plan was now to put in a 3×1 meter culvert, which would be highway grade, meaning it could take any highway load, 13 tons per axel. Sweet!

Last December I heard it was “all go.” They just needed to order the culverts, which were not “off the shelf” and needed custom manufacture. The problem was, it was mid December, and the factor shut down for summer holidays. So the soonest they could get to work would be late January. No problem I said.

SO I call up in February. “What’s up with the bridge?”, I ask. Problem, they have a new general manager. He wants to know what this expensive bridge is all about. He wants to fight out who will pay (contractor, Transpower, Allied Concrete). Time goes by. Finally I send a letter to the GM telling him to get on with it respectful, but forceful).

Finally, at the end f May, we are “all go” again. But wait, there is a new delay! The culvert has to cure for at least 2 months before installation! So the earliest we can get work done is end July/early August. And because the work is in a stream, and winter is peak water flows, they might have to wait until Spring.

And then a few weeks ago we got a major rainfall. The stream went over the bridge again (at least the 4th time in 7 years, it doesn’t help that the bridge is now a good bit lower due to the ongoing degradation).

Last Monday I noticed that the woodwork under the bridge (on the western, more damaged side) had fallen away into the stream leaving the bank exposed, and it had scoured back nearly 30 cm. Problem is, the concrete beam holding up that end of the bridge in probably only 40 or 50 cm wide. We are approaching “precariously perched”, and still have at least 6 weeks until the culvert is ready.

Hope we don’t get any more heavy rainfall, you know, in like, winter, when it rains a lot.

Watch this space.

We had planned to cull all our geese this Saturday. We arranged a big “de-goosing” shindig, with the former-professional-chef neighbour, foodie friends, and anyone else who wanted one of the ~19 geese.

We did a small de-goosing about 18 months ago. It was easy, we chased the waddling geese down to the yards, grabbed the ones we wanted, and released the rest.

Problem. The geese had “leveled up”. They could fly. I had seen them fly a bit, clumsily and downhill. No, now they could fly- like hundreds of meters, uphill, across the valley. Ever heard the phrase “wild goose chase”? We lived it for a few hours.

Thankfully they would try “going to ground” and hiding, and all up we managed to catch 5 that way. So those were processed. Late in the day Richard and Selwyn spotted 3 more, and got them with their .22′s. Selwyn discovered that head-shots do not stop geese, an important safety tip in case of a goose zombie apocalypse. By this point most everyone had left, and there were only a half dozen of us left to pluck and gut those last 3 geese. (And our chef neighbour got the dates wrong, and missed the whole thing.) We are hoping in a few weeks do have another de-goosing, and get the rest of them. I will try to win their trust with food in the mean time, to make them easier to catch (oh, the betrayal!).

And in the midst of all this, there was dog drama. There had been an attack down the valley overnight, 2 black dogs killed some sheep on John’s place, but he managed to shoot one. Zane spotted the black dogs chasing sheep across the valley at about 1PM, so 4 of us (3 with guns) leapt in a car and headed over while Tam started calling neighbors. The dogs got away, chased into the forestry block by some cattle (on a hill so steep it makes out back hill seem gentle). One was on 3 legs. On Sunday we heard via the Tawa grape-vine (via Yvonne) that someone had their dogs come home- and one was shot. A pair of pig dogs that had run off 2 days previous. Dogs put down, problem solved.

A very full day! We had 24 people over at peak, if my count was right. Including a red-headed mycologist (whose name I didn’t catch) who brought in all sorts of paddock mushrooms, gave a little identification class, then cooked up the edible ones for lunch! Yum!

At the very end of the day, when burying the leftover “bits”, it was commented that the goose wings look very much like most rendition of angel wings. This lead to the idea of a short story contest for a story starting with the line “the angel cull did not go according to plan.” He. We were a bit tired at punch-drunk at that point, admittedly.

It’s been a week since the Christchurch earthquake, and Wellington had its obligatory “moment of silence”.  At 12:51, the time the quake hit, the hundreds of people packed into Civic Square stood silent for a minute.  Actually, they’d been standing silent for a fair minute or two before then.  It’s kind of freaky, actually, to have so many people, in such a public place, in the middle of the day, standing still and silent.  After the minute was up, they played the national anthem, and hundreds of people softly sang along.  Well, for the first verse anyway.  Like national anthems anywhere, nobody knows more than the first verse.  Unlike some national anthems, the NZ one is singable by your average person.

We’ve had lots of people asking how we’re doing, if we’re okay.  I was trying to explain in an email to my mother how odd it is to be sort of fluttering around the periphery of this huge disaster.  All of our friends are fine.  As far as we’ve heard so far, their houses are fine (one friend lost her home in the last earthquake, back in September), though some have lost chimneys, and several have had all of their belongings dumped on the floor.  Here in Wellington, there was no earthquake, and of course everyone is fine — but the chaos down south sends up ripples and eddies that catch up locals.  Though it would be more accurate to say that locals are willingly diving in…

Kerry, who actually works in Emergency Management, has spent days in “the bunker” under the Parliament building, directing messages, fielding requests, routing calls.  Much of our own city council has been pulled in: as with the last earthquake in September, the building inspectors from Licensing & Consents have gone down to assess buildings, so people know if their houses are safe to live in.  The Arts Centre was repurposed as a refugee processing center, and most of HR (including our friend Mel) spent a couple days there coordinating services for people coming in, or working out of the national emergency management center.  Air NZ and the military put on a bunch of flights to mostly get tourists out of the city, and they sent them to Wellington, where many of them arrived with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, having left passports, toothbrushes, and everything else behind in buildings no one is allowed back in.  (The largest building in Christchurch, the Hotel Grand Chancellor, is currently leaning on a neighboring building, while engineers try to figure out how to bring it down safely.)  Geoff down in IT sorted out computers, laptops,  phones, etc. for the processing centre and for the airport.  Everything from setting up new land lines to take the extra call volume to finding chargers for cell phones so people could tell relatives they were alright.  Anyone who could spare an hour from their desk was asked to take a shift at the Council’s call center to take down details from locals volunteering to billet refugees until they got flights out sorted, or their consulate could get them new passports.  Our friend Sharon, who teaches Japanese, spent the weekend interpreting.  Zane, a geologist, is still down there assessing landslides.

And the rest of us sort of flap our hands looking for something useful to do, and in the meantime go on about our regular lives, while folks down in Christchurch are digging trench toilets to share with their neighbors, and boiling drinking water on gas barbeques.  The local eBay equivalent, TradeMe, set up sections where people can post offers of (or requests for) accomodation, lost or found pets, even rides around the country.  People all over NZ are offering their spare bedrooms, their beach houses, transport around the country, pet sitting services, whatever they have to offer, basically.  One ad read simply “If you are stuck somewhere because the roads are messed up, text me on ___ and I’ll organize a 4×4 to come and pick you up.”  In the city, the university students en masse showed up on campus and organized themselves into work crews and the army is coordinating with the ringleaders to put them to use where they’re needed.  (How often in history have students cooperated with the army so well, I wonder ?)   Canterbury farmers, who were spared the worst of it this time, are coming into the city with shovels, wheelbarrows, and even backhoes to help neighborhoods clean up the lakes of silt — ten feet deep in places — brought up by the liquefaction.

Even the big corps stepped up to do their part.  Fonterra rerouted its milk tankers to bring in water.  Coke is supply some crazy number of pallets of bottled water per day “until further notice”.  Air NZ has super-cheap “compassion fares” for people who need to get home, or get away.  The breakfast cereal companies are donating food, Johnson & Johnson medical supplies.  Heck, Loreal is donating shampoo.  One does what one can.

So, yeah.

As most of you have probably heard, there was a major EQ in Christchurch on Tuesday.

We are fine. All our friends in Christchurch are, as far as I know, physically well, though many houses are trashed (or “owned” as one persons 14 year old described it), we have yet to hear if any of our friends will be homeless.

Though this EQ was “only” a 6.3, the damage was much worse than the 7.1 on September 4th. One reasons was it was much closer to the city center- only 10km compared to 40 km, and it was very shallow.

The ‘modified mercalli’ shaking was higher. But that does not tell the whole story. (Though the whole story will take time as the Geologists and engineers study the aftermath.)

Earthquake intensity is a measure of the total energy released, which is intensity * time. This quake was short, but very intense, so while the total energy released was 1/10th of the September 4th quake, the shaking was much worse. They measured lateral accelerations of 1.88g in one location! That is *heaps*, the most ever recorded in NZ (though such instruments were not around in the long past), and maybe the most intense recorded ever? Not sure on that.

Image turning you house on its side and shaking it. Now image turning it on its side, hanging a second house off the it, and shaking it. That is the short of energy those structures had to absorb.

Either way, 1.88g exceeds the building code, even the strict code we have here. So it is not a surprise that some buildings went down, it is a surprise that more didn’t.

They have declared a national emergency for the first time in NZ history. Teams are coming in from around the world. I am on standby with WEMO (Wellington Emergency Management Office), waiting to see if I will be sent down to help. I’ve been doing civil defense for about 4 years, and have a bunch of formal qualifications, and it would be nice to help.

The reaction of the people, both in Christchurch and around the country, has been inspiring. Good folk. Sure, there are some ratbags out there taking advantage, but they are a minority. But on the whole people have taken responsibility and gotten stuff done, none of the helpless flailing and blame seeking that we saw after Katrina.

(And I am feeling rather merciless to people who exploit after events like this. I say we use the emergency powers and ship them all off to the Auckland Islands so they can learn how community spirit works, or die trying.)

On Tuesday afternoon our neighbor across the valley shot 2 dogs.

Dog attacks started about 12 weeks ago. AT first it was the odd ewe or lamb that went missing. ABout 4 weeks ago the frequency and severity really stepped up. Large groups, all torn apart.

Seven neighbors lost sheep to these attacks. Another had his pet tethered goat mauled.

Probably the only thing that saved us from attack was the surrounding buffer zone of (tasty, tasty) sheep. We could have easily have been looking at a dozen dead alpaca one morning.

The dogs were microchipped. They found the two owners. They admitted their dogs would go off wandering. One even admitted his dog came back covered with blood on occasion!?!

If only we could shoot the owners, too, in these circumstances. How long before they get more “big, tough dogs that make them feel like a man” and let them wander.

But for now the danger has passed. That is good.

Also, it is raining. That is *very* good!