When working in the right of way do you ever encounter crazy mad people? I had young(probably on drugs) dude come out with a shotgun today. I'm usually good at dealing with people but he was OUT there and no calming him down. I called the sherif since I had to work in front of his house for a few hours. I'm done with his street but still working nearby and am kinda worried about my machines being vandalized. I had a pistol on me but really don't think pulling it would have helped the situation. Crazy day!!
That sounds kinda spooky. **** can go sideways quick. Glad to hear you were strapped. Stay strapped or get clapped, as they say. I usually only have to worry about mosquitos and curious bears. Well, wait a second. Apparently, rabid moose are a thing now. Add rabid moose to the list. North America's first known case of a rabid moose confirmed in western Alaska | Fox News State wildlife officials in Alaska have reported the discovery of a moose infected with rabies, marking the first documented case of a rabid moose in North America. www.foxnews.com
Hold on. Edit. I’m not done. Growing up watching 70’s network television and movies, I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it actually turned out to be. Gilligan was always getting stuck in quicksand on that damn island. Apparently, I need to watch out for quicksand, too. This place is always trying to kill me. 'Mother Nature has no mercy': Man gets stuck waist-deep in Alaska mud flats, drowns as tide comes in A man walking on tidal mud flats with friends in an Alaska estuary got stuck up to his waist in the quicksand-like silt and drowned as the tide came in before frantic rescuers could extract him. Authorities say 20-year-old Zachary Porter, of Lake Bluff, Illinois, was submerged Sunday evening as... apnews.com
You certainly find some crazy owners doing right of way work. One property my wife and I went to was like that. On the previous maintenance clearing he had come out with a cross bow threatening everyone, the cops were called and he was locked up for 3 days while the job was done. So 2 days before we had to do the job we decided to pay him a visit and tell him of our intentions which he was happy with. A day before we were due the super arrived and gave us a lecture on how to deal with this " difficult owner " which was nothing like what we had already experienced. We rocked up and the owner said he would like to help so we had a walk around and found a spot were he could go nuts without holding us up. Man could that guy work. Turns out his craziness came from ultra deep diving on oil pipelines for to long a periods and to much drugs when he wasn't. It was the arrogant way the power company and the principal contractor had spoken to him that triggered his behaviour. My wife and I never had any problems with him whatsoever. I heard threw the grape vine he was locked up again on the next maintenance clear.
There's simply a lot of people who should never be given access to firearms. An elderly neighbour of my father, a gent in his 70's, pulled a rifle on some Water Supply workers who came to do repair work on his water meter (which was just inside his property). This was in the mid-1980's when suburbs were a little more relaxed, blocks were larger, and laws in general were more relaxed, too. The fathers neighbour lived on a couple of acres, and we never had any real problems with him - but none of our family interacted with him much, either. The Water Supply guys retreated and call the Police, the Police arrested him, he was charged with threatening behaviour, and fined a moderate amount - but more importantly, his firearms were confiscated and his firearms licence revoked, so he couldn't revert to shooting people randomly. I guess the approach by the Water Supply people to advising this guy that Water Supply workers were going to operate on his property, was less than satisfactory - but I believe the gent in question was also possibly suffering some cognitive decline - and he died not long afterwards. Dementia, cognitive decline, drug use, and explosive personalities are never a good mix with easy access to firearms.
Sigh...posting to subscribe to the thread. It'll be easier to find later when it hits the fan.
Lol Perhaps when working on a easement you should contact the homeowner first instead of diving straight in. A few years back they installed fiber in this town and workers did a real bad job on the grass and dirt and I had to clean up after them. I wonder why I don't like people on my property?
I put in miles and miles of this stuff if waited till I could talk to every homeowner I'd never get anything done. The vibratory plow cuts it on so you can barely tell I was there. Where I have to dig to locate utilities I seed and straw before I leave for the day.
There's probably nobody else that actually cares like you do, the rest of us have to pick stickers out of the ground that happens to be just where they works and take a shovel to re level the ground. Taking to homeowners can save you time and money when they tell you about lines you don't know that are in the ground.
If I see homeowners I talk to them, but when you're doing 1000 to 3000ft a day and cross many houses it's just not possible to speak with everyone. This is an area I just plowed through.
You must know the locate guys on a first name basis.
And the damage inspectors. Lol. When you call in mile log tickets the markers get lazy.
I had a recent residential locate where they missed two or three things and fortunately I didn't tear them all out but it was like seriously? Get back out here!
How good are your underground records in the U.S.? Ours are pretty good here in Oz, and it's all online, so you contact the relevant utility and they send you a comprehensive plan very quickly in an email attachment. But of course, when doing work very close to utilities, it pays to get the location identified precisely, as sometimes the installers got a little lazy or a little wobbly, and the stuff isn't exactly where it's supposed to be. I can remember some water supply guys in our country town having some excitement, when they installed a new water main in one of the towns major streets - which street contained all the cables to the local telephone exchange. They got the telecom services locator guy out and he paint-marked all the cable locations, and the water supply guys ripped into the street with the excavator, parallel to the telecom cables - and next thing, up comes a big cable full of splintered telephone wiring!! The water supply guys nearly had heart attacks, they had visions of massive communication outage bills - so they called in the locator guy again, and asked where he'd gone wrong?! The locator guy said, "Oh, don't worry about that cable, it's been abandoned, and it's no longer in use! I didn't see any need to mark it!"
We have so much fun with that. On a job. We had a 600 pair that would come up looking like fine spaghetti, It was fully abandoned. We kept a chunk of it around to tease whoever would come along, throw it out there and go. Oh my God we've hit the phone!
Certainly you could print up some generic posters with your contact info, and stick it on (not in) mailboxes the day before. Around here, some of the utilities advise customers of upcoming work, and I.D. (name of the subcontracting company) who they are, mentioning to look for their badge.
It's a little (a lot) un-nerving to be drilling post holes in a marked area and still hit gas line about a foot down. Thankfully the pipe wiggled loose and was only about 18 inches long. It appeared as though the contractor threw left over pipe in a hole and buried it.
Moderator life, eh ?
Yes I noticed the trigger statement. I've learned over the years on here that even though we share a lot of similarities on both sides of the border. There are some things that can trigger folk, and are best not mentioned.
that is one of my pet peeves. Guys toss most anything in a trench and I will get it back out and dispose of it properly. I am not excavating this for your lunch garbage or scrap materials. When you come across it now you go into investigation mode till you figure out it is just some pig tossing stuff in a fill.
Think of it as a digital rolodex. HEF is a place to get away from politics that do not pertain particularly to heavy equipment. So we try to be aggressively neutral on general politics. We can discuss angry landowners and how to handle them however we are not going to debate whether someone should or should not own a weapon. There are multitudes of other platforms to discuss, debate and rant that topic just not here on HEF.
I growl truckers all the time about throwing garbage in their box. Always looks professional when they dump a load at a home owners place, and an empty oil jug, a grease tube or a timhortins coffee cup rolls out.
Doesn't matter if they have a shotgun or a car, if someone wants to run you off it's not very hard.
This came to mind
A bulldozer isn't a weapon ?
Aggressively neutral. If not we have one of these at our disposal -
100% When I was 16, I worked for a little while with an excavation contractor who did power company contract work. When lunch was finished, they gathered all the trash and threw it into the ditch and covered it back over. I was young, but I knew that was wrong. Now that I work for myself, I carry a small mini brute garbage can with me in my truck. A lot of my customers / the foremen notice it and appreciate it. Sometimes its the little things that go a long way...
In the oilfield everyone would toss their trash out the window when driving and the ditches had way to much trash in them, they also smoked in the pickup. When I ran a crew those both stopped, funny how people get mad at little things easy to solve. Also the seat belt thing I mentioned in the cb thread as you can get pulled over so I'm not losing money because you can't wear your seatbelt.
I like guns but don't think one needs to be brought out and waved around while screaming at someone working 1ft from the edge of pavement on the street side of the ditch. How does that help anything? Politics wasnt even on my mind when I made the post.
It doesn't help anyone, and if you wanted to run people off there's less risky ways to do it (waving a gun at someone is a good way to get shot)
some folks could drive you off by getting upwind. " he could knock a buzzard off a sheeeit wagon"
Greatest hits LP, 8-Track, cassette and CD, Chick had pipes.
she also wrote a bunch of songs for others. her story is a great one, making demos with Paul Simon to make a buck back in college, for one example. "An excerpt from Hilburn's Paul Simon biography: "During a demo session his freshman year, Simon met another talented young singer and songwriter, Carol Klein, who was also a first-year at Queens College [...] The teens became friends, and King even helped him with one of his math classes. In the spring of 1959, they worked together on a demo for 'Just to Be with You.'"
Crazy people are the problem, not inanimate objects. If it was a knife then no one would even mention politics. Funny how selective people are when trying to push their agenda huh.
I'll reiterate it one more time - HEF is aggressively neutral on politics. Threads like this start to be like house guests that have overstayed or the stinky cheese in the fridge that is days past its prime - all need to be thrown out.
It's not your post. It's what it can trigger for responses. One miss placed reply can start a cascade of bickering. As long as we all behave, and choose our words, it's all good
"ya can't talk to a man, when he don't wanna understand" "shotgun in his hand!"
I was thinking more on the lines of "Dude looks like a lady"
Now that's a whole 'nuther topic that we for damn sure ain't debating here on HEF.
If a mod wants to edit the title to not attract and argument I'm cool with that.
I think it's a story with a happy ending. Cooler heads prevailed. Fiber was plowed, and I don't mean it got drunk either.
Re the disposing of garbage in your worksite, etc - I'm pretty careful to avoid littering and poor disposal of waste - but when I was an agricultural earthmoving contractor in the 60's and 70's, I dug a few thousand dams (ponds) - and I'd throw empty grease cartridges, empty oil cans and drums, filters - and lunch wrappers into the dam walls, so they were properly buried, and didn't show up as litter or untidiness that someone else had to clean up. Now, the kicker here is - in the 1960's to 1970's, my fuel and lubricants supplier was a guy who was agent for a brand called Golden Fleece. I used hundreds of thousands of gallons of Golden Fleece fuels and thousands of gallons of GF oils, over about 8 years of using GF products. GF sold very good quality oils and lubricants, and it was a popular brand in Australia. GF also ran a very large number of gas stations with good restaurants. Golden Fleece started in the fuel and oil business in Australia around WW1, and the company logo was a big golden ram on a blue background. GF's artwork on their product containers was outstanding - and today, any container with Golden Fleece artwork on it, is worth a fortune!! So, I've probably buried about a couple of million dollars worth of Golden Fleece containers over that approximately 8 years of GF fuel and lubricant use, trying to be nice and tidy!! That must explain why I hate throwing anything out today!! Golden Fleece oil containers - Google Search