2024 June 22: I Got To Go Back To Work!

...well, for about 90 minutes. I was on a "Teams Call" (that's "Zoom" for Microsoft Victims) with my old co-workers for a good 90 minutes, then hours pouring through my old records and maps. Looking for things like this:

The City is pulling together its much-awaited explanation for Why It Happened, and, if possible, Who Lost The Watermain, for public-lynching purposes. My own trip to the gallows is unlikely: my involvement in large-mains inspection dropped rapidly after about 2007, and all three pictures today are from an excellent presentation on it given in 2009 by somebody else - great work I remained unaware of right through retirement. Still, it uses some maps I set up for the staff that were rapidly moving, at the time, from "Engineer in Training", to "top professionals". I only got this call because they are all too busy right now to help explain their ancient history.

2009 is fifteen years ago!?! And even then, we had surveyed the whole city for the kind of soils - that "toxic waste in your garden" I ranted about in the paper - that eat watermains. Great slide showing how the soil map made generations back by the Alberta Research Council was used to find soil-testing locations.

The dark brown polygon is from the Alberta Research Council; the light-brown buffer (I used "buff" as the colour, obviously) around it is created by computer. Everything within 100 metres of the suspect soil was tested, pipe looked at.

There were, and are, very few programs on the continent to compare to it; that it failed anyway is going to be quite a story.

2024 June 20: I Got Into The Newspaper

2024 June 19: Deer and Sticky Willie

2024 June 18: Think Pink!

2024 June 17: Alan's New Flowers: Busy Lizzie

2024 June 16: Flock Gathers Below My Podium

2024 June 15: Bell with an Ant

2024 June 14: Just Ducky

2024 June 13: Rugosa Rose, and Oh, Deer!

2024 June 12: Azalea

2024 June 11: Beairsto Backlog

2024 June 10: Resumption of Dora's Page with Alan!