Morning all,
An interesting few days since I got here on Friday.
As you all know, Mark has now left and we’re looking at employing another guy, John, who is currently working in the middle east. I’ll tell you more about him once we’ve confirmed his appointment but he was brought up in the French speaking parts of Africa and has worked in this area, Europe and the middle east for a number of years. I got him to do a French assessment with a fluent speaker who tells me he speaks African French with an Irish accent...
We are currently a little behind programme on the foundation works but have started a plan to get back on track.
We’d been struggling a bit to get things signed off by the laboratory who have been incredibly onerous with their testing regime but this has now been sorted out.
For now at least.
Our contractor had also overfilled some excavations, under dug others and he had also used sub-standard fill which needed to be dug out. We’re on top of all this now and are making good progress.
I had a good meeting with the contractor this morning and explained what he needed to do to expedite the works, and what might happen if he didn’t. He’s taken this on board and we have had some more guys arrive today and another 10 are due tomorrow. We’ve also asked him to source another plate compactor to speed up the hard filling and this should turn up tomorrow as well.
The guys we do have are also going to be working till 6 instead of 4 with more shorter prayer/rest breaks, rather than one big lunch break.
As you can see from the photos we have our first cages ready to go down their respective holes. The guys doing the reinforcing have laid these out today, ready for installing into position tomorrow and Wednesday along with checking final positions and levels.
On Thursday we’ll be looking to start concrete placing.
We have also now done away with the site concrete. This was a local requirement to keep the reinforcing steel off the hard fill but now we’ve shown them our plastic chairs and had a discussion on how we will ensure appropriate distance to the laterite and therefore cover to the concrete.
The government controller and the government lab were against this initially but have now agreed that we can do away with this requirement.
This on its own probably saves us 5 days.
We now have a brand new concrete mixer on site (see photo) and have a second coming in the next few days hopefully. Before we get too excited though I should point out that we tested the first one on Saturday and the hopper lifting mechanism broke so it’s being repaired as we speak. Not a good start but then it was made in China with an Indian motor. The motor has a hand crank (I can see some bruised ankles and wrists coming up unless we’re very careful) and is of the type that you could fire it up today and as long as you keep it topped up with fuel would still be running in 50 years time.
While the contractor was convinced it was a 1m3 mixer, we have now put him straight- its actually more like somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7m3. In terms of quantities, he reckons he’ll do a batch every 15 minutes so on the conservative side we should do around 2m3 per hour. With 2 machines this will be ok for the foundations but obviously not for the floors so we’ll keep looking here with other contractors (including the Chinese bridge crew), the client will keep looking all over the place and hopefully we’ll come up with a solution this week.
In terms of controlling quantities of materials, they have a system here where the laboratory takes samples of the gravel and sand and weighs standard sized containers full of it. The mix design is then given to the contractor in terms of number of containers of each ingredient per batch. Water is also metered this way. Seems to be the simplest and most efficient way of doing things.
I have also found 6 guys to help Stan and Lindsay when they arrive. S&L will be on site next Wednesday so we’ve arranged of their workforce will be here Thursday. The guy I have appointed as “foreman” of the crew used to live in what is now our store room and is the son of the guardian who worked for project Azawak. We’ve yet to agree rates but as they don’t have jobs now, I’m sure we’ll come to an agreement.
As you can see from the photos, all our guys now have hard hats and boots. This might sound like a simple thing but it’s taken a lot of persuasion and cajoling from David and Mark to get to this stage so all credit to them.
As an upcoming excitement, we have been invited to our driver’s wedding this weekend. Not sure what it will entail as I’ve never been to a Muslim wedding (or in fact a Muslim anything) so it’ll be an interesting experience.
Don’t suppose we’ll be rolling home at 3am in an alcoholic stupor though.....
On the domestic side, our cook has done a bunk along with a huge pile of cash given to him by us and more cash from the client in terms of wages. While we look for another I’ve been cooking and Dave’s been on washing up rota which works quite well while there’s only 2 or 3 of us but we’ll have someone else sorted before too many more people show up.
That’s all for now,
Me
