It looks as if the rain may be tapering off for a bit. As much as we love it, the almost 1″ we received Sunday did mean a lot of culvert work.
On the way home Sunday evening Andy cleared the culverts on our part of the road, and also worked on the culverts by/through the del Norte stream. The “gold star culvert” in front of the brown gate was in good shape—he only had to push some junk into the rushing water to make it completely clear. The 3- and 4-foot culverts for the del Norte stream needed more work.
The 3-foot one was completely blocked, but mostly with vegetation so it was fairly easy to clear up. The 4-foot one was still carrying water under the road and all he had to do was remove a couple of rocks. The big problem was at the lower ends of the culverts where rocks had blocked the exits enough that both culverts were filled with junk to a depth of about a foot. He had to spend a great deal of time clearing them so the water could run freely. Even so, he couldn’t have done it that quickly if the rushing water hadn’t helped a lot.
He looked at the culverts on the road down from the fire station on the way home, and saw that the entrance to two of them had to be dug out. He didn’t have time to work on them because as he said, he didn’t want to get home so late that I would start calling in the “national guard” to check on him. (We really do need to get a better communication system. I’m starting to look into that again.)
Anyway, today he cleared out a tree that was blocking one of the culverts…
Tree in culvert
The rest of the tree
and Beate and Tim dug down and opened the two buried culverts.
We were already hoping to have Orlando come up for two weekends after the rainy season to both improve the road and to do the regular maintenance of cleaning out the basins in front of the culverts, and we are hoping we don’t have another heavy rain that means an extra trip.
August 4, 2015
You sure are having some very interesting times there. Here in India, we use RCC pipes for use as culverts. I will send you a photograph by email.
Thank you. I enjoyed seeing and Googling them. It’s fun learning new things.
it’s the soil apparently! so soft and sandy like it seems.
here it’s clay. water runs off.
and near all culverts they put in huge boulder like rocks and then cement around those! not the prettiest in the world but it keeps them from clogging i guess.
i’m all for you getting better communications with andy when he’s up there alone too! xo 🙂
I ordered myself a cellphone today to see if it would work up there. If it does we’ll stop Andy’s and let him use the new one. Keep your fingers crossed for us! It would really help — I’ll let you know.
erosion seems to be the major hassle, here they plant a type of tussock that stablises the banks and stops a lot of that happening…
The problem this season is the soil became saturated, so it slides down where the banks are steep.