Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening all, (delete as appropriate),
We hit 45 degrees today.
And yes, this is quite toasty. Not a single person on site was wearing a coat in the afternoon, although a few still wear beanies all day.
The humidity is quite low at 15%.
We started today with low expectations but have been pleasantly surprised.
Our 8:05am curfew worked well this morning with only 3 guys coming in late. They’ve been warned that if the same happens tomorrow, they’ll be sent home for the day.
Even our main contractor’s supervisor Ali, came in early- arrived at 07:23 which is the first time since he started that he has beaten his guys in to the site.
Maybe the message is getting through.
Its only taken 3 weeks.
The 4 chippies with tools and timber that we organised yesterday also all turned up this morning and have been put to work on shuttering.
Unfortunately more chippies arrived as well but they had no tools, no timber and no skills.
So they went home again.
Having poured our 7 column bases yesterday, we stripped them today. Whilst the tops are a bit rough this will be sorted out by the grout under the baseplates but the sides have come out pretty well.
See attached.
We spent today pouring a few infill strip foundations and managed a total of 16.6m3 m3 which is pretty good, especially after the hassles of this week.
Our workforce were very pleased to be going flat out again after being directionless and unorganised for a lot of the week.
Once they have a clear task and direction, most of them are bloody brilliant and we’ll probably keep a few on once the contractor has either finished or been given notice.
Whichever comes first.
The owner, is back from Tunisia today so we’ll no doubt be having a discussion tomorrow.
Our resident Lab guy, who doesn’t do much at the best of times, came in at 11oclock this morning and advised me that this afternoon was a special holiday.
Special is right as no-one else had heard of it.
He then told me that as we were pouring concrete, he was prepared to stay but only if I paid him overtime.
I told him that we wouldn’t be paying him overtime as his contract is with the laboratory and not us.
I also suggested that he call the minister, our client, and explain to him why we’re an additional half day behind schedule.
Needless to say, he saw it in his heart to stay on and observe our concrete batching this afternoon.
As an example of why we won’t be building anything with timber here- see resized photo. This shows one of the posts holding up our profile boards around the site which has been eaten almost all the way through by the termites. Bear in mind that we only put these up in December...
Yesterday we also went to the laterite quarry to have a look around and see how much is available etc.
The quarry photo shows the excavator.
He is the guy with the shovel.
He is also the screening plant, and truck loader. I’m guessing he has a stack of mates who come in to help him out but we’d be able to get things done so much quicker with a bit of mechanisation.
On site, we moved our sand stockpile about 100m using guys, wheelbarrows and shovels. This took a good 3 hours and would have taken 10 minutes with a decent loader.
Everything here, from going to the hardware store to working on site takes longer than we think it’s going to.
That’s it for now,
Me
p.s. running out of African film titles for updates, feel free to suggest other completely unrelated random titles....
