UPDATE: All 4 Kits: One adult and One Yearling seen tonight. Beavers make LA TIMES
The first piece installed just as promised. Not too much vibration, and a straight entry into the bank. Skip even seemed a little giddy that things were going so well. The next piece was less smooth and by the time they got to the third, they struggled again and again to install, even readjusting the location to accomodate entry. Apparently there was something underneath the surface that made installation impossible. Could it be the concrete footing that our expert identified and the city denied ever existed? Could it be old piers that nobody bothered to investigate?
So the top of the first sheet was shaved off, to the tune of about 12 feet. The next piece was no better, and they ended up taking nearly 15 feet of that. Now Mr. Engineer who designed this project and was onsight said that this could conceivably happen before hand, and that as long as “there was an engineer on site to verify that they were entering something firm like bedrock there was no problem.”
In this case though, no one knows what they hit, because no one did their homework.
A friend from the Urban Creeks Council stopped by and was alarmed at the work. One thing he said that made huge sense was that work like this should never be started without a soil sample, taken straight down at the wall site.
Obviously if they had done that they would have found the footer, which would have proven that the bank was unimportant to the wall, which would have ruined the emergency.
In case you’d like to see how “unintrusive” this work is, here’s some footage. Remember I’m standing a block away.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sfu9Fik5fVg]
