HBA installation progress — 07-Jul-2011

Another status update. We have made some progress today, but it has been slow going. The work on deploying framesets has caught up with the anchor drilling and setting so this has caused a bit of a queue while that work proceeds. Unfortunately, the rocky ground is making work on the drilling very time consuming. Additionally, it is causing the driving rods to 'mushroom' at the ends, due to the heavy pounding against strong ground resistance. One two occasions, the driving rod jammed in the ground. The first time we managed to get it dislodged with a team of people and a strong lever. However, the second time that was not enough and we needed to haul it out mechanically.

However, despite the delays, there has been progress and we now have all the laying of the geotextile completed. Five framesets have be put onto the field and three tiles have also been added to the array. The newly deployed tiles are shown with white, bold identifier numbers on the progress chart.

We have some concerns about the levelling of the tops of the frames, possibly due to the level of the field, or possibly due to subsidence or inaccuracies in the frames. At this stage it is difficult to tell the exact impact of this, so surveying work will be required. We intend to attempt this first thing in the morning, while the drilling team presses ahead to try to get a lead over deployment works. Once that is done, we hope to be able to roll out a fair-sized batch of frames and tiles to bring the week to a good finish.