Just been reading the snow thread ... Never had the pleasure of getting stuck in the snow but I have to wash the sand from the undercarraige once ...

Here we can drive on the beach, which is about 27 miles long ... There are a few city maintained approach roads to the high tide marks ... A nice older couple in a Crown Vic had gottten off the side of the approach and into the soft sand ... Got them out with a bit of shoveling and a logging chain ... To celebrate I got myself high-centered on a dune ...

I think I was watching something other than where I was going ...

 

Bummer dude!!
How did you end up getting all 4 back on the ground?

 

Not much snow here this year, no sand....but we have lots of mud.



The mud stuff seems to follow me everywhere we work.
First day or two are not usually to bad.
At the end of the first week it usually looks like this or worse.

 

Thats some prety deep mud don't have too much of that in vegas but when i went home for chistmass had to pull my dads samy out of the mud wasn't exacly stuck just didn't run too well under water almost thought I wasn't gona get him my BFG alterains loaded up right away but I just hammered down and cleared them out and pulled him an extra twenty feet just because he couldn't stop me! But people sure look at me funny when I'm blasten my 350 QC LB threw woops out in the desert!

 

You guys in WV do it backwards. Normally, you build some sort of a road to your site and then commence the digging.

In Oregon, we couldn't get away with that. The environmentalists and the government would have the job shut down before you set foot on it. They have pretty much run the farming and logging industries out of town.

Jason

 

Put 3 people on the back bumper and backed off ... One guy wanted to push from the front ... I shoulda let him ... He was driving a beemer on the beach ...

 

That was a sewer project right beside the creek.
The rainy season started the day after the sewer project.
The right of way for the sewer was the road and project all rolled into one.

I am actually in town in that picture, there is a 21" sewer line 10 feet below my truck.
Since the hill to the right in the picture is almost straight up 90 feet vertical, there was no option for a road.

Sewer projects get higher priority and less red tape than normal construction jobs here.
And we were working for the government and enviromentalists, so no flack from them.
Something about the choice between a bit of mud in the stream versus raw sewage in the stream.

Just downstream in the next town, there is no flat spot between the hill and the stream.
When they replace the sewer line there, I want to see that job happen.
Houses hanging over the bank at the top of the hill with a 60 degree slope about 100 feet long right into the water and trees everywhere.
I want nothing to do with that one, basically cut trees and dig a deep trench under someones house.
The only place to lay the dirt out of the ditch is going to be in the creek, which means nothing but mud to backfill with.


My house is not to far from where that picture was taken, it sits on the side of the hill to the right in the picture about 500 feet behind my truck.
The tree above the passenger side stack is in my yard.

 

The environmentalists around here would cry foul for mud OR sewage in the stream. I've worked on logging jobs where we had a water truck staged at the entrance of a job to wash off the trucks as we came in or out so we wouldn't bring foreign dirt in or take any dirt from the area with us.

Jason

 

They do that here, but with the terrain we have and the locations of the main sewer lines there have to be sacrifices in some locations.
The sewer mains are along the streams.
Either you get new right of ways and move the lines using pumps and hammer through solid rock, or are digging through soil deposits along the streams, usually on ground to steep to stand on if the dirt is wet.
All the lift stations and new right of ways would cost a couple fortunes per mile.

The costs to replace the lines without bending a few rules, sometimes rather hard, would meant that most of the sewage would be going in the water.
That project in the picture was 5000 feet of 21" main line, 750 thousand dollars to do the job.
Since 4 towns use that same stream for their drinking water supply in the first 40 miles downstream from here, that is not an option either.

The local DNR will not let you work near a stream during spawning season April 1 thru July 1, before or after that season, you do the best you can to follow the rules.
I have never seen sewage in the stream take a back seat to a little mud in the stream when push comes to shove though.

The loggers here are in the same boat as you.
As far as the environmentalists are concerned, those trees can stay there where they are growing now.

But they don't want the streams to smell like sewage and they don't want to come up with enough money to do what it would take to replace the sewer lines following the rules to the letter, so they are a bit more flexible for sewer projects.

 

EPA has us hogtied in some things too ... gotta leave buffer zones along waterways ... Even for farmers ... Can't have cows going in the streams ...

 

Road building, ground work and site prep is our main business. We don't get into the sewer installs or repairs other than excavation. On the jobs we've been involved with, the sewer system is installed under the roadway in every case I've seen. I've never seen one installed that close to a fresh water source either.

Jason

 

With all the stuff that can be found in a sewer system, we are trying to get away from that as well.

The area I am at requires a company be versitile.
Right now we are working inside a building removing the floor and excavating 5 feet down to remove a layer of pyrite.

The ground water got into the pyrite, which swelled up and raised the floor 16" in several places.

There are actually sewer lines in stream beds here in several locations.
Back in the day when they were installed, they may have been in the bank of the stream, but today they are under the stream bed.

People started settling this area in 1772, so we are talking a lot of very old pipes in a lot of locations which are over 100 years old.
Most were installed by hand excavation with materials transported by horses, so they used the easiest routes to get natural gravity flow.

 

I understand that.

Here is a good example of the common sense that the local and state government as well as the environment concerns have in this state. In the town and area that received over 13 ft of snow in the last couple of weeks they are trying to get the town dug out with help from the National Guard. In trying to get rid of the excess snow, they were going to dump some of it into the river. The government stepped in and said that it couldn't be done because the snow is considered a pollutant. If the snow were left to melt naturally, it would find its way into local streams and eventually reach the river anyhow.

Jason