You can never be sure when the weather is going to catch you out. Since my last blog the team had been making great progress in Pound 25. We got to the situation at the weekend of 13/14 May when a large area of the pound's base had been prepared for concrete.
Now, as you can imagine, mixing, transporting, laying and finishing a large pad of concrete is hard work, even with a good turnout of volunteers. It seemed a good idea to have a delivery of concrete by one of those 'mix it on site' wagons and this was arranged for Wednesday 17th May at 11.00 am. The weather forecast for that day was not good but the heavy rain had not arrived as promised. The volunteers were ready, the site was ready and just before the delivery was due it started to rain fairly heavily, but not so heavily as to cancel the delivery. The concrete arrived on time and just as the wagon was backing in to off load, the 'Big Pipe' started to flood. Literally within five minutes the whole of pound 25 was under water. Working within it was impossible and we had no alternative but to arrange for the delivery to be rescheduled for the following week. A narrow escape indeed, if the concrete had gone down it would have been washed away and caused all sorts of problems.
The following week the concrete was successfully delivered. Go down to pound 25 and take a look. Much more work has been done down there. We have had to call a temporary halt to work within this pound as the larger yellow dumper truck is in need of a new clutch and we need this dumper to trundle up and down Tamworth Road legally. In other ways the weather has not been too unkind to us.
At the other end of our current workings, beyond the narrows, the brickies have completed the wall adjacent to the towpath and with the soil now in place between the wall and the towpath the whole area is starting to look better. We have also started work on the other side of this area, see my previous blog. and a fairly large area is now under concrete. Another week perhaps and the brickies can make a start on that side. I can't thank the Tamworth Road volunteer gang highly enough for their support, good humour and hard work, for however long they spend on site, be it 3 hours 8 hours. We'll get there one day.
