This Site’s Not All That’s Under Construction

Well, I’ve just come back in from the cold. Lit­er­al­ly. I’ve been out most all night and into the morn­ing at a con­struc­tion site in the Hamp­ton Roads area of Vir­ginia on a con­struc­tion mon­i­tor­ing job. Yes, I watch peo­ple work on con­struc­tion. It’s not a bad gig, if you’ve got long ther­mal under­wear and a good book to read by dome-light in your car. Oh yeah, you’ll also want a decent pair of work boots because the stuff that this oper­a­tion digs up is like walk­ing through the waste site of a mod­el­ing clay factory.

Setting up to take level shots at the construciton site

Essen­tial­ly, a Jack & Bore pipe instal­la­tion is a method of push­ing a pipe through the ground from one open­ing to the next, all the while, using a auger inside the pipe to bore out the soil it is dis­plac­ing. It’s a good way to get a pipe under some­thing you can’t dis­turb, like say a rail­road. Wikipedia does­n’t have any­thing on Jack­ing and Bor­ing pipe, and I did­n’t see any­thing with much googlar­i­ty to even both­er with post­ing on here. Suf­fice it to say, if you real­ly need to know about this sort of pro­ce­dure, then you prob­a­bly already do.

How­ev­er, this does­n’t real­ly explain why I’m post­ing about it at the mid­dle of the morn­ing on the week­end. Back to the whole mon­i­tor­ing thing, I’m out with a co-work­ing tak­ing sur­vey­ing data and writ­ing field reports cov­er­ing the con­struc­tion under­way. It’s bor­ing enough, but on top of that, the cur­rent tem­per­a­ture out­side is around 35° F. I’m not real­ly lov­ing my job right now.

That’s too bad, because my co-work­er just called my room and it’s off to the job site to take anoth­er round of lev­el shots.

Published
Categorized as General

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

2 comments

  1. Please call me on sat, 3/17, to dis­cuss geot­ech­ni­cal aspects of a jack& bore con­struc­tion site: [num­ber removed by admin] Thanks, a fel­low Vir­gin­ian resid­ing in Ohio– GWT

  2. Well, it would appear that for what­ev­er rea­son, I still come in quite high on Google search­es for Jack & Bore pipe instal­la­tions. That’s kind of sad, as it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing method of con­struc­tion. How­ev­er, I should be clear (as I explained to Mr. Tal­i­a­fer­ro) last week­end: I’m not an expert in the field. My role in this project was that of con­struc­tion mon­i­tor­ing, not the tech­ni­cal aspects of geot­ech­ni­cal engi­neer­ing. As a struc­tur­al engi­neer, my occu­pa­tion is relat­ed, but very dif­fer­ent. If you’ve come across this page in the search of infor­ma­tion on the top­ic, I sug­gest you con­tact a local geot­ech­ni­cal engi­neer who can pro­vide you with more infor­ma­tion on the top­ic as well as region­al infor­ma­tion as geol­o­gy varies great­ly with, well, geo­graph­ic regions.

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