Road work and utility work and questions

For the past few weeks, Birchwood Road, which is the road ours connects to for most places we go, has been under construction. This is long overdue and it looks like the end result will be worth a bit of hassle. It took a long time to get things underway because even though we are talking about two miles of actual roadway, it required the cooperation of the Town of Delton, the Village of Lake Delton and I assume folks from Sauk County and the State of Wisconsin for approvals and funding and so on. Every time most folks were on board, someone would suddenly back out and so ...

Anyway this work involves widening the road and much care for utility lines and pipes. They came out last fall and planted multi-colored flags along the road to show where everything was. Then nothing happened until the snow came and the plows promptly covered and shifted the flags around. So this spring they came and did it again. It took a long time to get this accomplished and they seemed most diligent about it.

Our power company decided while this is going on to move the power lines that run up Berry Road (our road) underground. This is part of a general move toward buried lines, and we appreciate the fact that there will be less worry about lines going down when tree limbs fall or ice storms weigh the lines down. This project also called for the placing of many flags. Tom has some reservations about the flags because they seem to have completely ignored the fiber optic lines that were laid a couple of years ago. He spoke with the guy overseeing the project a few times but was not convinced we were going to get by without major disruption to internet, television and phone service.

This morning when I went out to the end of the drive just to enjoy the fresh air, I noticed a sign between our drive and the neighbor's. Upon examination, it turned out to be a "Utility Work Ahead" warning. At the end of last week, we had noticed that the power company had started digging up the ditch along our road and laying line. They had stopped, however, as we later learned, because the rocks which abound around here had broken their equipment.

Why, then, had the sign shown up this morning? I assumed they were going to get started again. So I got my camera and went to take a picture of the sign to use on a humorous post. Tom put on a pink hardhat and came to pose by the sign. You can see the results here. Click on the picture so you can read Tom's hat.

While I was taking the photo, he warned me that a car was approaching from behind me. I stepped off the road, turned and waved as the driver pulled up and stopped. It was a young man with three small children. I called that I was just waving, but he indicated that he wanted to speak to Tom.

For whatever reason, he thought a man in a pink hard hat was actually an authority. The reason he stopped was because the road construction people had apparently torn open a gas line down on Birchwood. At this point we realized that the slight smell of gas in the air was indeed gas, not just some morning miasma. The guy was hoping Tom could tell him what was going on. Which he could not.

That was about eight this morning. As of three this afternoon, the gas line is still being repaired. They turned the gas off somewhere, of course, and the air no longer smells bad. It seems ominous, though. After all that effort to show where all the utilities were, they still managed to rip open a live gas line. Fortunately no one was hurt. What this portends for our fiber optics, we don't know. In the middle of the afternoon a guy showed up to mark where the fiber optic lines are, but he told Tom he didn't have much confidence about what was going to happen.

At least it won't stink up the air.