A month or so back I was on a job up in PA putting in 11000 ft of anode for corrosion control on a gas pipeline. I was on a 650J Deere backfilling and plowing snow ahead of the crew when necessary. The excavator operator started out with a 75 Deere which worked well in the swamps but switched out to a 120 when the going got tougher. Good thing he did, because he ran into some good-sized rocks, and had to dig up a few hundred feet of access road which had been plowed and was frozen pretty deep. Every so often he had to dig over to the pipe, expose it all the way around and weld connections for the anode to it. Pretty interesting to me, first time I've ever worked around this sort of thing.
WEEEEEE that looks like fun. Welding to a gas line makes me nurvous.
Last week we went back to clean up, re seed and mulch the right of way we tore up. Snow, ice and frost had prevented us from doing more than a rough backfill before. I had another 650J to do the bulk of it, a little (18000 lb, I think) rubber tracked Takeuchi excavator for the swamps, a Takeuchi tracked skidsteer, and a straw blower. My one eye still isn't working right, and while it didn't bother me much on the dozer it was a real challenge to operate the excavator with no depth perception:cool2 First pic is of a section of finished right of way, the two transformers on the poles are to power the anode. Second pic is of the straw going down. Third pic is digging down the middle of the road when we were installing the cable initially. Fourth pic is the road when we were done.
Me too:drinkup
where is PA was this?
Middle of nowhere, seemed to me. We stayed in St. Mary's, about 30 miles from the job.
Small world.....St marys is about 15 minutes from my house.....I bet that equipment was all rented from Foster Wineland. Do you have any idea what gas line you were working on...I bet I drove right buy you guys a couple of times...
How about that, small world indeed. The first job we rented from Foster Wineland, the second from United. I believe it was National Fuel's K12.
Looks like a very interesting job, how long were you guys there?
It was very interesting, totally new to me. It took 2 weeks working 10 hours 7 days a week for the install, we did the cleanup in 4 12 hour days.
WOW, thats a lot of hours...I bet 70 a week got old after day 5.
yall shook all that straw by hand?
It does in a way, but if I'm away from home I like to work like that- no sense in sitting in a hotel room doing nothing, I'd rather knock it out and get it done. I don't like it for an extended period of time, though, especially in the winter. I worked a job a few years back where the contractor got behind and had us working 7 10's for a couple of months. It was winter, it was cold, we all had an hour+ commute in miserable traffic. We didn't see our homes in the daylight for that period of time- left in the pitch black and came home in the pitch black. Kinda depressing, but it was a prevailing wage job and the money was outrageous. I'd do it again in a minute if given the chance:drinkup
Naahh, we had a blower. You can see a bit of it in the first pic of post #3. It's red.
We had a rainy day middle of the week, so we went sightseeing. Pics one and two prove that we were in Elk County. Pic three is Parker Dam, very small but picturesque, pic four is a nice little HD7 hooked to an Austin Western grader parked next the dam to show what they had to contend with while they were building it
Then we took a ride up to Austin Dam, quite a distance but the guy I was with had seen it before and said it was worth it. It was. Amazing to be able to walk all around it, under it, over it, wondering what it must have been like the day it failed. Third pic is of me standing part way up it to give a sense of scale. The last pic is of Bayless Paper, downstream from the dam. Here's a link toa site with some before and after shots and some history, lots more like it if you Google Austin Dam. http://www.gendisasters.com/data1/pa/floods/austin1911.htm