FIRE!!!!

Along with the new culvert job, there was a big mess made last week when the landfill caught on fire. Last Thursday was really windy across the valley and there was a lot of lightning. There were big fires in Skull Valley, out by Salt Lake International Airport, and out by us. The fire started sometime around 4:30 on Kennicott's (RIO TINTO) property then blew across the highway onto our property. It started on our side by the water tower and headed north along the berm that separates our main building and the highway. Luckily we have really competent operators that fought the fire with the water truck and dozer, preventing the building from catching on fire, until the firefighters could show up and take over. The firefighters showed up and put the fire out. We had around ten acres or so get scorched and a couple power poles to Granger get toasted and need to be replaced. On the plus? side, the landfill now smells like smoked hickory which is nice....unless you have an office...because then it just burns your eyes.









Ironically, all the weed pulling we did a few posts back was really worthless since it would've gone up in flames anyway.

When the boss is gone...

Last week my boss, my supervisor, and Esther were gone...so I made a mess! It was fun. Craig, the operations manager, asked me about doing another riprap job but it ended up into a culvert replacement. The culvert that goes under the road and into the overflow pond was undersized (6" diameter) and was buried under at least 24" of sediment. We decided to replace it with 2-12" diameter HDPE pipes that had been left over from our LFG piping job. I got to be the foreman in charge of a backhoe, scraper, and dozer. We dug out the old culvert, replaced it with the new pipes, dug out the inlet side and the overflow pond, buried the new pipe, and re-graded the road.

An overview before we started

Laying the new pipe

Digging out the inlet side

View of new culvert and dug out inlet side

Grading and repairing road

Digging out the overflow pond