Hydro-Vac-ing Fell Channel PoolOn the morning of Aug 24th, Al & Sandie had organized a hydrovac to pull sand and silt out of the pool at the outfall of the pipe that takes water from the main-stem into the Fell Channel. In my previous post, I had mentioned there was around 50 Cutties and Coho fry holding in this particular pool in tight quarters. They ended up getting a whole bunch more space to move around. After it's installment 20 years ago, the Fell Channel has not had too much upkeep, as it hasn't been required. However, Al & Sandie figured it was time to do something to the first pool as it had seen the most sediment fill in over the 20 year period. The morning did not start off to well, the company dispatched the wrong size of truck. It was much larger than requested. It was actually so large it could barely fit width-wise along the trail. To make matters worse it was too tall, and some of the truck's hose ended up breaking when it got tangled in the branches of a maple tree. This caused the truck to lose air pressure in some areas. The driver was a little bit nervous and asked dispatch to send out the mechanic. After about 2hrs of working it's way up the trail, the truck was finally in place. Fortunately we were able to get started without the mechanic. One of the issues was the crew was stuck using the smaller Vac as the larger one required repair. They made good work for the first 30 mins or so, then we seemed to get plauged by large stones getting stuck in the hose every 10-15 minutes for quite some time. Everytime there was a clog, the hose had to be shut down manually and hammered until we found and broke the clog free. After about an hour or two of vacuuming the truck lost power, good news was the mechanic was driving up the trail road. He showed up in under 2 minutes and got the truck back up and running in no time. We got back to the Vacuuming for another 2 hours, ran into a bunch more clogs, and then the tank ended up at about 70% capacity or so when we decided to call it a day. When hydro-vac-ing the truck ends up filling up largely with water instead of the intended rock and gravel. We did pretty good given all the hiccups along the way. However we would have done much better had we a smaller truck with it's large hose working. Here are some pics! Pool After Hydro-Vac was complete
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AuthorKeegan Casidy Archives
January 2020
CategoriesMosquito Creek,
North Vancouver, British Columbia |