…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.
Right-o. When we last left our intrepid travelers, they/we were in a minivan (driven by our Svan host Jia Japaridze) on a day trip to Ushguli, a remote village in Uper Svaneti. Somewhere around here:
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….
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.
I have an issue with dogs. We have actually had a few, those Greyhounds we fostered a few years back, but too many people don’t understand dogs.
They are hunting and killing machines (like cats) that work with their humans. All dogs have the wolf still lurking within.
The upshot of all of this is we now have one less alpaca. I caught the dog, which was happy and friendly when I came out to see what the commotioin was- a big Rotweiler standing over the body of a 5 month old. (The alpaca and its mother had been in the pen by the house to treat the young ones staggers, I heard lots of alarm calling and went out to see what was going on- the attack had just happened, probably only seconds before. Altun was still alive, he died less than a minute later in my arms.) Animal control came and took the dog away. There were no external signs of injury, and the Animal Control officer was concerned the dog might “get away with it” (which is why most farmers apply the “shoot, shovel and shut up” procedure to any dogs on their land). My post-mortem examination turned up “good news”, multiple sub-dermal haematomas on the neck consistent with the pressure marks of large canine teeth, some torn musculature on the neck, and a broken cervical vertibrae- it snapped his little neck.
I *really* want to know where the dog came from. I don’t know of any neighbor with such a dog. It had collar and tags, so they should be able to track down the owners pretty easily.
So I start my weekend angry and sad. I am struck by the irony that years ago, back in the lab, I used to joke “I’m glad I didn’t go to Med School, ’cause when you have a bad day as a MD, people die.” Now I get to deal with those bad days, except I get to do the post mortem, and dig the grave, too.
Edit: Turns out this is an “everyone loses” situation. We found out today that the log- an 11 month old puppy- had been newly acquired by Kim up the road. She is really upset. They have been dog owners for years, yet this puppy was an escape artist. When the pound called them, they discovered it had been in the pound multiple times before- caught wandering. So the seller knew it was a problem dog, and didn’t tell them.
Kim and Shawneee were looking for the dog immediately after it disappeared- it had run ~1.3 km down the road, and up our drive. They went 1km down the road, but the alpaca we have grazing on a drive up the road were completely unconcerned, so they figured it had not gone that far. Maybe it run past and they didn’t notice, or it ran past and 5 minutes later they were calm again. Just stupid bad luck he came up our drive, and that led right to a pen where we had Altun, who was not at 100% anyways because of his staggers. Mora, his mum, is upset and wants to know where her baby is, but that will pass in 3 or 4 days.
The dog will most probably be left at the pound, and be euthanized. I think they are going to go after the seller for false representation.
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.)
We shore two animals this morning, and that marks the “end” of the shearing. The end of the list we know about, that is. I am sure a few more will emerge from the woodwork over the next few weeks, but at least the long weeks of seemingly-endless shearing are done. All up we shore about 150 animals this season, including our own.
The alpaca stuff is generally winding down for the season now. We have a few cria due in Feb/March, but hopefully that goes easily. Most of the matings are now for other peopl’s animals, which is nice, because it is business and a bit of income.
Looks like I will be busy bottle feeding for the next few weeks, though. A friend, who has also had a very tough year with her alpaca, had a new mum fall over dead on Saturday- leaving a 3-day old cria at foot. For the first few weeks, the young cria needs about 6 feed per day, so I will take care of it since I can. When the cria is a bit older it can get by on 3 or 4 feeds a day, and it can go home. For better or worse, I have gotten quite experienced at bottle feeding.
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!
Of course, you may ask when is it not “crazy time” for us. Perhaps I should have called it “the busy time”.
Shearing all of our alpacas started last week. (12 down, about 40 to go) We will be shearing every free evening and weekend for the next 2 weeks to get them finished. And when that is done, we get to shear almost every other camelid in the Wellington region. Every other shearer who used to work in the area has either moved away, become to busy, or is fully booked with shearing closer to home.
So, basically from now until mid December (at least) every evening and weekend is booked. We are trying to fit in some social stuff in the cracks in the schedule, just to make sure we are extra-exhausted.
Oh, and did I mention that cria are due to start dropping, and we need to start getting matings going again. And delivering animals we have sold. Plus other stuff I am sure I am forgetting right now.
Busy indeed. Crazy even.