Can we dig it?
Can we dig it? Yes, we can! Or, more accurately, yes we need to in order to move the project along.
Having held out ’till the end of the year, the Christmas break gave us a little reprieve from the long and frankly exhausting year before. Hard to believe that in January 2018 we had no idea that the barge needed to be shifted and we would end up living on site with it.
With little else on the horizon this seemed like a great opportunity to start the process of getting the project underway. We need to get our structural engineer in to work out what additional steel we need in the structure and to allow this it was definitely time to clear the remainder of the silt out from between the steel ribs. Due to the winter sun getting so low in the sky, this now meant that in the brightest corner of the barge we had dry and hard gravel right through to the opposite side where it was as wet and full of water as it had ever been. Added to this was the fact that the this silt had sat down in the ribs for years and taken on a smell all of its own (and not in a good way, either).
Each section between the ribs would give up its main haul of mud quite willingly before stubbornly refusing to help with all the corners and over-hangs. The barge is also held together with thousands of rivets and required going round all of them with a small hand trowel getting the dirt out from between and behind them. This was just time-consuming and frustrating but the real effort was the removal of the dirt. Into buckets it went before we carried it along the barge, up a ladder, across the rear deck, down another ladder before taking it outside and dumping it on top of one of our existing earth heaps.
A job only made easier by ignoring the sheer scale of the task meant a very pleasant surprise when we looked up to see that the entire inside was completed. A short break now before we cut out the bulkheads to get at move dirt in the ends of the barge!
