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In Which Green Day Sees Through the Illusion: "Back in the USA"

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austin_blue11/24/2017 10:53:08 pm PST

re: #37 Anymouse 🌹

WTF? When I need to find a water pipe (being the town water operator), I use a metal detector or the town maps of our water system.

Town maps notoriously suck. We were putting in a series of recovery and injection wells in Houston at the Sol Lynn Superfund site south of I-610, just east of Fannin Street in the early 90’s. We had the Houston utilities maps and had cleared all the placement points with the City and hit an 8” main on the opposite side of the road from where it was mapped. Chaos ensued.

Popping an 8” water main results in the creation of a very large crater and a sprightly new river. We barely got the rig out of the way before the back wheels sank. The City of Houston Water and Wastewater people were pissed. We showed them our maps, they checked theirs, and admitted that theirs were wrong.

I had an old hand show me the value of dowsing rods for finding shallow buried metal lines some years before. While we were waiting for the W&W people to show up, I pulled them out of my car and walked the street and found where the line crossed from north to south, and then where it jogged back north again. I painted the turn points on the pavement and told the W&W people where the jog was. They brought out metal detectors and confirmed what my coat hanger had told me.

I don’t know if dowsing can tell you where water is, but it definitely works with shallow metal lines. Two years later we had an ER in Burnett and we knew where the gasoline, as a result of 16” of rain, had risen with the shallow groundwater and was entering an old sanitary sewer that was fired clay, bell and butt pipe (i.e., not sealed). Waiting for equipment, I walked the street with my rods and found what seemed to be an old steel line crossing the road where we would have to excavate to get at the sewer line. The line led to an old building foundation. The building had been scraped. I told the City crew that there might be an old gas or water line there and that they might want to get One Call out to clear the excavation area. They were worried that the gasoline was almost to the sewer treatment plant and wanted to get after it. Sure enough, we popped a blinded 1” natural gas line 18” below the street and had to stop and evacuate the area for 1 1/2 hours until they could shut off the gas to the immediate area.