It's been a long semi-productive weekend

If you count it from my overtime standpoint. Not to good if you look at it from my employers. I got called in for a water main break as the water crews' boss was 2 hours to the east of San Antonio. As I was comming back from looking at the first one, I noticed another one- pushing up the asphalt at an intersection. I called the water boss, and made a line locate for it too.

As we were waiting the alloted two hours for SBC to locate their fiber-optic lines, we got ready to dig. The only people who showed up from the water crew was the boss and the on-call guy. I can't say much beacuse my entire crew wasn't there all at one time either, but everyone I called showed up.

We started digging about 5PM at the corner of our first leak, and found- alot of buried cr*p that we had to identify before we could let the backhoe work. We finally got down to the "leak" and found out the water was comming through a PVC sleeve with most likely the fiber-optic and what looked like about 76 pair copper line.

Oh fun- now WHERE is the water comming from?

As we were digging- machine assisted hand digging, we found ANOTHER PVC pipe marking something else. By this time it was about 9:30- 10PM, and we decided to barricade it off and work on the other one about 3 blocks away. That would be easier to fix- an 8" PVC Main that had a history of problems. Everyone knew right where that line was, and it was exposed with no problems in minimal time. We threw a big pump into the hole, de-watered it and slapped a "band-aid" (pipe repair clamp) on it in no time.

By the time we had it backfilled ( the boss wants us to backfill with calichie) and semi-cleaned up it was almost 11:15PM. We decided to come back at 8Am tomorrow and see about the other one, as it was on the downhill side of the same road-in conduit- just maybe to see if we'd fixed it, too.

We came back this morning and the hole was almost dry, so we spent about 2 1/2 hours on backfilling, compacting and hauling dirt.

So 10 hours of time and a half helps, but I don't want to make a habit out of it. It's been dry here, though and the ground is shifting, so it's going to get busy on the waterline front this summer.