We are fortunate in Lancaster County, PA to work with an intelligent and reasonable group of Conservation District Officers. They are charged with keeping silt out of the streams and mud off the roads and they accomplish it without big egos or dramatic productions. I drove onto a project yesterday and heard we were getting a visit from one of the Conservation District personnel. From my early days in construction, I immediately tensed.

I remembered working for a boss when I was an excavating foreman in Maryland in the 1980s. My boss tried to go over the head of a local Conservation District officer to his bosses to try to cause him some grief and lessen his recommendations. Well, lots of grief was caused, but it seemed to come mostly in my direction. The Conservation Officer now took the position that every erosion and sedimentation control measure we had installed was unacceptable and he shut down the entire project and until we got every one of them perfect. I recall working a 12 hour day on July 4th (isn’t that supposed to be a holiday?) to try to get the project re-started.

Our site visit yesterday, on the other hand, went smoothly as a few small issues were discussed and resolved. I’ve been pushing everyone on site to keep the mud off the road. Blake Murphey, who works for a local excavator, sent me this photo that shows a landslide that covered a road. Now that’s some mud on the road.

Check out all the hydraulic excavators working to remove the mud, it gives a sense of the scale of the photo.

If you want to see the source of the “That’s not a knife, this is a knife!” title that always cracks me up, just follow the Crocodile Dundee link.

By the way, sorry for the lack of updates. We’ve moved the blog from WordPress to this site and have been hurdling glitches ever since.