Posted yesterday on Facebook. To the extent that there’s a difference, apparently I should have said streetworks, not roadworks. You can look it up.
Roadwork, today, right in front of our house. This drill machine at left banged into the street, like a woodpecker, turning up pieces of asphalt pre-cut some weeks ago. Then this truck at right with an enormous vacuum cleaner hose sucked dirt out of these holes. Men extended tape measures to see how deep the holes were. A while later a huge dump truck full of dirt tipped up to refill the holes. Then some temporary asphalt was poured in, with a roller machine to press it down to street level. Then they were gone, by noon. I don’t know what they accomplished.
One of my Facebook friends (part of the short fiction reading group, in fact) has a professional background in utilities, and he replied thusly:
It’s not unusual to use those vacuum excavators to pothole existing utilities. As long as you have them fairly well located horizontally, finding the top of pipe elevation without damaging it is very helpful for underground construction.
And further:
The other option to locate underground utilities is to use a backhoe. Much, much bigger hole and a much higher chance of damaging the underground utilities.
And I replied that while I’ve seen backhoes — one was parked across the street from us a couple months ago — I’ve not seen them digging up our street.
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This is something of a filler post, to maintain my record of daily posts, in ten minutes. Now, back to working a longer post, a review of the new Neil deGrasse Tyson book, which I plan to finish tomorrow.
