The excavator the contractor selected was slightly smaller than the one he had originally intended to use, but the space between houses was the determining factor. As it was, it was a tight squeeze getting to the work site. Once there, it was a matter of wiggle-room only, and there was precious little of that.
The work crew had to install a dam in the culvert of the creek, roughly under the middle of our street, the design being to divert the flow of water to an area outside of the work area of the banks and the bed of Codornices Creek - for ease of handling materials, the crew opened the storm drain at the street curb, and proceeded to drop amounts of plastic-poly sheeting and a large number of sand bags down to the work crew in the culvert. There, they built a dam with the poly-sheets and sandbags, and arranged a system of flexible plastic pipes to carry water from the dam through the flex-pipe across the backyard away from the creek channel to a point downstream of the work area - this would prevent contaminants from entering the stream...
In a moment of civic consciousness someone called the police indicating that someone was dumping toxic waste down the storm drain...! None of the neighbors thinks it was anyone from the neighborhood - everyone knows we have been with this project for years...! |
One of Berkeley's finest did appear in his finery to check out the incident report, and I explained that the crew was actually working for me, and there were extensive engineering plans and permits from three federal, state, and regional agencies, and the city, and would he like to review them - he declined, and instead called in a "411" indicating that everything appeared to be in order. He only asked that I verify my name and address with my driver's license - thinking about it, it was good that someone called it in...
I think it's a rule of the universe that unexpected things happen at all construction sites - ours was no stranger to this. On the first day of construction, at 7:00 AM in the morning, a huge branch of a eucalyptus tree came crashing down onto the construction site in our back yard. This tree is on the back of the lot of one of the neighbors on Hopkins Street - as it happened so early, there were no workers on site, or there could have been some very serious injuries. Ironically, the neighbor had scheduled for a tree company to come that morning to assess the tree in question to determine which branches should be removed for safety reasons. Opps...!
Then the contractor and excavator operator began their magic with the massive big boy toys, and the fun began... |
