I’m now a member of a Red Cross Emergency Response Team, and we were activated and sent down to help. (There was a period of yo-yoing and we got a series of conflicting go/no-go instructions, as Red Cross tried to figure out if teams were being sent, and if so, which teams, and when.)

Our Porirua-based team ended up being down there Wednesday and Thursday last week. I was assigned to a team doing phase two house inspections. This team had a civil engineer, a geologist, and a NCC building inspector. Plus me, the Red Cross rep. It was my job to be Welfare support- to talk to the homeowner, determine if they needed help, and get them registered with the Red Cross, and give them info (phone numbers) on who they could call for assistance and information.

But our team ended up going out mostly to do re-inspections on red-stickered houses. Red sticker means evacuate now, so there were very few homeowners for me to interact with. So I spent my time working with the experts trying to assess the ongoing risk to damaged or threatened houses- could we go from red sticker to a conditional yellow, or even a green, and let people back into their house before Christmas?

And this is where I discovered that spending time with Zane induces an area of effect knowledge of geology, especially landslips. Probably due to his habit of coming back from his work-related geotech studies and giving us fun little slideshows of the landslides he’d been studying. What this means is that I ended up as a participant, not just an observer, as we explored the land damage and assessed risks.

Scarps and Tension Cracks and Unstable Surfaces- Oh My!

I saw plenty of million+ dollar houses, with fantastic views, which were doomed. Building on the edge of a steep hillside for the (admittedly fantastic) view is fine, until the hill falls away dooming your house, and threatening the houses beneath. We did at one point follow a bunch of ground damage downhill and found a house that had been missed in the initial survey which had a huge unstable soil mass hanging right above the main bedrooms at the back of the house. The homeowners probably weren’t happy to find the new yellow sticker on their front door when they got home- no sleeping in the house until the land was fixed.

It was satisfying to help people out. The homeowners we did meet were all so grateful to see us arrive- they just wanted help and some knowledge about their house and its fate. I discovered that Red Cross has very good brand awareness (no real surprise there). I was interested to note how when people discovered I was a volunteer, out on the street 3 days before Christmas, they were extra appreciative people were giving their time for them. It made them feel good and valued, and that is why we were there. The threat of losing your home is tough on people, doubly so before a holiday. The Welfare aspect is not why I joined the RC team- we’re trained in all sorts of Search and Rescue, Triage, and First Aid stuff- but at the end of the day we’re there to help, and if that means just being a sympathetic person to talk to, then it’s time well spent.

After the trail ride (see previous post), and a bit of recovery time, we hooked up with Renata for some more ambling around town. There are a couple of mineral water springs in town, and we followed some locals who were going to collect water. One of the springs came up actually in the river bed, so at some point when the flow was low, a wall had been built so that the spring would be accessible all year. It was startlingly COLD down there in the bottom of the gorge, next tot he rushing river.

I think I mentioned before how the rivers in the mountains are like tigers – they will eat you if you aren’t careful, and they roar. The three of us spent a while coming up with schemes for opening a adventure tourism scheme that would send you down the river in a Zorb, including plans for getting you out (or not) when you got stuck in one of the many steep narrow gorges.

Here are the awesome Renata, our host Laura (also awesome), and me, on the front porch of Laura’s house. In addition to running the guest house, Laura is an anaesthesiologist, sold the tickets for the marshrutka (the local minibus), and was also organizing meals and lodging for the guys in her husband’s work crew, who were putting in a new water main while we were there.

This is the view from their front porch looking out toward town. The house you can see on the other side of the front garden is where the cow that produced our breakfast yogurt lived. In the courtyard, I mean. We saw Laura helping the old lady milk it one evening. Renata related an interesting conversation with one of the builders. She had remarked on how beautiful the view was & one of the men replied that it was, but that it made them sad, because Russia owned those mountains now.

The next day, we toured Mestia some more.

You’ll recall that the livestock is freerange…

Except this bullock team, taking a break from whatever it was they were doing — probably hauling firewood.

One of the houses, including its tower, is open as a sort of family museum. Basically, this is the family’s old house, more or less unchanged since the 14th century. The woman whose family owns the house pointed out the parts that had been updated — the ironwork around the hearth, for instance, was relatively new. It was really cool — the little corridor of pens along one wall were for the sheep and goats, with a little arch for each one to stick its head through to get fodder. The bigger arches were for the cattle. Though the animals were all pastured outside during the summer, in the winter, they lived in the big common room with rest of the family, where everyone could benefit from each other’s heat.

I got the impression that it was mostly used for family gatherings now, and of course showing off to tourists. The view from the tower was pretty cool, too.

Our Russian was not great, and Laura & Jia’s English was not great, but we did our best, and overall it was a really terrific experience. One evening we all piled into the minivan we’d taken to Ushguli, and we drove up to one of the ski lifts at the valley rim. From there we could see the lights of the valley spread out below us, each of the medieval towers lit up by its own soft yellow light. Really beautiful. THey told us how someone had put up some money to have an international specialist come in and design new lighting for them, and we joked about getting them done up like the Tbilisi TV tower (which has a crazy light show which I think we described earlier). We compared the Caucasus and Ushba — the valley’s sort of sentinel mountain — to the Southern Alps and Aoraki/Mt Cook. The whole stay with them was really just lovely.

Here we are, back in Mestia, in Svaneti, Republic of Georgia, way up in the Caucasus. We’d arranged with our hosts to go on a little horse ride, not realizing that the day we’d picked was the day most of the valley was going to be off mustering cattle (with their horses).

They nonetheless managed to scrape up a couple of mounts — a brown gelding and a black mare. Slight complication: the mare had a young (as in days old) foal at foot. The boy who delivered the horses initially tried to take the foal home by leading it away with a rope around its neck, but it didn’t like the idea, and neither did we, really. Little foal needs to stay with its mom ! We assured everyone that we would take it easy on the trip and take breaks for the little guy to eat and nap.

It did take us a bit to get out of town. For one, our horses pretty much had two speeds: slow, and amble. Various helpful passers-by tried to get them going for us by making various giddy-up sort of noises. At one point, we took a wrong turn and a helpful soldier gave us directions. Then we had to pass the airfield, which seemed to go on for days (unless you were landing on it, in which case I’m sure it would have seemed far too short).

This house, made from a pair of old caravan trailers, would not be at all out of place in New Zealand.

We stopped for lunch — Laura had packed us khachapuri (cheese bread), boiled eggs, and other tidbits, which we shared with the guide that the Georgian Canine Tourist Guide Board had assigned us for the day. We put the cokes in a stream, which got them plenty cold, and the foal had his own lunch, and one of several naps.

While were eating lunch, we were passed by a mob of cattle, being taken further up the valley. They were going faster than we were.

As you do, we eventually made up names for the horses. Stephen’s black mare was “Chernobyl”, my gelding was “Three Mile”, and Chernobyl’s foal was “Fallout”. Har har. Laura laughed when we told her.

This was as far as we chose to go – had we been on foot, we could have gone across this bridge and around the boulder to the other side of the river, where the track went up to the glacier that fed the river. Alternatively, we could have followed the trail we were on through a gate made of young birch trunks along a ledge farther up the side we were on — that was evidently the path the cattle had taken. As it was, we were content to turn around. On the way back, somewhat saddlesore, we walked more than we rode, often only mounting to cross streams.

As we approached the airfield, several helicopters landed, their occupants driven into town in shiny black state cars. We found out later that this was the President, and a wealthy Swedish investor who was about to put a lot of money into the town developing a ski resort. Exuberant locals honked and waved as they drove past us.

Also exuberant were some of the horses that had returned from the morning’s muster — we had to chase off a couple of young ones who wanted to play with the foal. This boy, though, contented himself with posing.

There was a bit of confusion due to our bad Russian when we got back, over who we were supposed to pay for the horses (tree, treenatsat, treetsat…), and how much, but it all worked out in the end.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

It’s very much a mix of modern and medieval up in these remote villages. This bullock team is bringing in a load of birch trees for firewood.

We pretty much drove straight through and out the other side, where Jia parked and we were given the option of hiking a few K further to the glacier that feeds the river.

We elected not to do the hike out, as it began raining on us. We took shelter in some old church buildings.

And then we sat in the van and ate the lunch that Laura had packed for us — boiled eggs, khachapuri, and I passed around the walnuts and churcheli that we’d acquired. Stephen described this dog previously:

He seemed perfectly friendly and tail-waggy, but we were all — Svans included — happy to stay inside the van while Renata tossed him bits of her lunch out the window. You can see the thick coat and the round bear ears. Harder to spot in this photo are the wickedly spiked collar and the scars on his muzzle from fighting off wolves. The Caucasian mountain dog is a working dog, not a pet, and the guide books warn travelers not to try and get friendly with them.

After lunch, the rain eased a bit and we wandered into “town”. Seriously, this is a lot what I picture a medieval village must have been like, with livestock wandering around, and a bit of diverted stream running through the middle of one of the uneven cobblestone streets, and people just getting on with their regular lives, farming and sorting out their food and heat for the winter, and etc.

As we were wandering through, we were intercepted by a 10 year old boy who took us to the “museum” his family ran. It was basically a barn, with a bunch of amazing stuff inside — stuff that I nearly wept to see not being looked after better. There was one light bulb to illuminate the gloom & I wish we had had more time (and a flashlight) to stare at all of the wonders. The Svan are known for their woodcarving — here are a couple of the pieces I managed to photograph:

I’m not even sure exactly what this was used for — our guide had a little bit of English, but not quite enough. Isn’t it stunning, though ?

On our way out, we met the rest of our party in front of a house featuring this gorgeous panther over the door. Similar art shows up in rock carvings and elsewhere.

And that’s it for Ushguli. Horse trip next, I believe….