[AusNOG] OT: Re: Pipe hiccup in Melbourne

[Karl Auer]

On Tue, 2015-02-10 at 16:05 +1100, Mark Tees wrote:
> If a sizeable tunnel was built on either side of roads where all the
> common utilities go

I lived for nearly a decade in Forn Parts (no Spoonerisms, please!) and
lived beside a fairly important road into the city. Over winter, a bit
of a pot-hole developed, maybe a foot or two long and maybe a couple of
inches deep. Not really a pot-hole - more of a crack, or rift. One day
City Works showed up to fix it. In Australia you'd expect a shovel-full
of gravel to be chucked in, plus a quick spurt of liquid tar. It would
last one or two days, then there'd be a pothole again for a couple of
months. Rinse and repeat.

Not here. Oh no. They re-routed traffic around the block, then dug up
the road almost the whole way across it, and for two metres along it,
over two metres deep. Then they started layering various soils, sands
and gravels back into the excavation, building it all back up to the
proper street level. Each layer was carefully compacted. Finally they
layered tar on top of it all, and rolled it flat. You could barely tell
there had ever been a hole. A week after I thought they were finished,
they came back - and added about a centimetre of tar mixture to account
for where the traffic had slightly compressed the new section. They did
that again about six weeks later. Driving over it, you really had to
know they had repaired the section, then if you concentrated you could
sense the slightest difference in road noise, perhaps feel the slightest
of slight bumps. But not after the third lot of tar mixture. Then it was
absolutely imperceptible.

Now, this was a pretty big operation, right? So it would take many
weeks, right? And hugely inconvenience the commuters, right? Wrong! They
worked on it only at night, from about 10pm through to 6am. They covered
the hole up with massive steel plates during the day, and let the
traffic flow again. And the whole thing (bar the two followups) was done
in about a week.

I'm sure it was very expensive indeed to fix the road like that. But I'm
just as sure that that section of road will not need further attention
for about a hundred years, so I'm guessing the investment was worth it.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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