Road Repair

We had a brief respite from the rain for the first few days Tom and I were back from Guatemala, and then it started raining again the middle of last week.  Tom and the crew were planning on doing road repair anyway, but when the culvert in front of the farm started washing out and making the crossing unsafe, that project quickly rose to the top of the heap.

The first part of the project involved communication.  Fortunately M is home, so she called Hidden Valley and told them that if they wanted to get out, they should get vehicles on the other side of the culvert and prepare to run shuttles with the passengers walking across.  We didn't see any activity, so Tom went over to talk to their manager in person, who then realized that their driveway out to the main road was also flooding, and suddenly this project was their top priority too.  We sent out emails to tour companies who go to 1000 Foot Falls and the Mennonites who own a large tract of land east of here and tend to use the road on weekends, and told them that it was unlikely they would be able to pass.

With the word out, the crew went to work.  This is what the road looked like at the beginning of the week, after the first round of flooding.

After another few inches of rain that morning, the washout had crept another foot or more into the roadway.

They took the backhoe down to dig trenches (this was Tom's virgin introduction to using a backhoe since our heavy equipment operator was out sick for the week) to bury some logs in the roadway to prevent the loss of more of the roadbed, divert the water running down the hill towards the culvert, and to pull the loose dirt away from the washout.  Back at the barn, they constructed boxes of cage wire to be filled with rocks to build a wall.

Three dump trailers full of rock were collected (thrown by hand into a dump trailer hauled by the bulldozer) from one of the streams that washed out in the flood.

After they dug down to where the roadbed was still solid, they put a couple of long poles under the dirt to form a temporary bridge.

They covered it up, drove back and forth a few times to tamp down the mud, and drove metal poles on the side to both mark the edge and hold the poles in place.

Next week they will fill the cages with rocks and build the wall around the culvert.  But for the weekend, this temporary crossing seems to be holding.