Morning all,
Now that we have returned to normal after our dress-wearing weekend, we continue to do battle on site.
The plan was to stockpile materials and finish screening enough gravel to keep the concrete mixers going all week. Unfortunately the guys only got enough done for about 2 days worth because of truck related issues. They also didn’t have as much steel tied as we had hoped, and hadn’t delivered any pipe for our penetrations..
Consequently, we put a hold on the concrete placing and then got the company’s owner, out and had another discussion about being prepared for the week ahead.
Boube unfortunately keeps getting louder and louder when confronted with a difficult issue so it turned in to a bit of a shouting match with him getting louder and me shouting at him to stop f***ing shouting which wasn’t good for anyone. I shouldn’t have lost my patience but it did shut him up for a bit. He is the sort of guy who doesn’t listen to what his guys tell him so Ali, his foreman, gets just as frustrated with him as we do.
We definitely needed to give him another kick up the arse but next time I’ll be taking him away from the work area to do it.
We’ve since made up and agreed that the site is now a “non-shouting zone” apart from my office!
After all that kerfuffle, we received the pipe we’d asked for a week ago, the welder arrived and started welding up for the wricon system, trucks started coming in and we screened gravel through an additional screen with some more guys.
We’ve done another 3 pads today totalling 5.8m3. Tomorrow we start on our strip footings and the quantity should increase again. I reckon that if they prepare sufficiently as we have been telling them to, it is possible for us to do maybe 30m3 with our current set up. This is both machines going full noise for 7.5 hours which allowing for lunch/prayers/general shagging around is feasible though probably unlikely.
We are missing quite a lot of steel so we’re just re-arranging our programme to try and keep up the momentum on the project. We should have enough spare steel to do a couple more pads on the coldstore area and we’ll have to go shopping locally for the rest. We’ll need to talk round our controller as he has already said he’s not happy for us to bend re-bar on site.
The missing abattoir steel will probably be best sourced out of Hy-ten in the UK and we will have to work around this for the next few weeks until it arrives.
I have to say that our immediate concerns on site are less about what happened to it, and more about when the replacements will arrive so that we don’t get further behind.
Finally managed to get a chance to go and see the Chinese guys building the new bridge over the Niger river but unfortunately picked the opposite end of the bridge to the site offices (which can’t be seen from the road) so having had a quick look at their work which didn’t look that flash, I’ll try the other side tomorrow. They do have a 5 or 6m3 concrete truck though, therefore there must be a batching plant somewhere on the site, presumably near the site offices. Will report back tomorrow if they allow me on site.
Dave and I have both enrolled for French language school here. Having had a few unsuccessful attempts for Dave to get private tuition on site or at the villa, we’ll now do an intensive course- 3 nights per week, from 18:00-20:00 for the next few weeks. Larabas has kindly agreed to pay for this which is great. We start next week and it should help us both.
It will also help Al, who now works for us as on site logistics and stores manager. When we went to the school to book our lessons he turned on the charm with the female organiser so I suspect he’ll be outside chatting her up while Dave and I slave away over a hot notebook.
That’s all for now,
Me
