WorldWide Drilling Resource

Tales from the Field by Jeremy C. Wire Geoconsultants, Inc. The Lady with the Checks Sometimes, incidents in the field are so unusual and out of the ordinary, but not necessarily in a dangerous or life-threatening sense, they are recalled from time to time, particularly when passing by the location where the incident happened. In this case, a field project involved the excavation of test pits with a backhoe to shallow depths of 15 feet at various locations on a piece of property. The purpose was to develop soil profiles and check for the occurrence of shallow groundwater which might affect the operation of septic disposal systems for a proposed residential development. The work was going smoothly as far as operations in the field were concerned. However, during the day, we noticed a lady in one of the neighboring homes kept peering out her back door. We observed this occurrence about every hour or so, but she didn’t say anything to us, and we figured she was either just curious about what was going on, or was bothered by the noise and was being too polite to complain. Accordingly, we didn’t pay too much attention. We left several test pits open during the day to see if any shallow groundwater would seep in, which did not happen, and we were ready to backfill them by later in the afternoon. During the backfilling one of the test pits, we saw the lady who had been observing us all day coming toward us, pulling a child’s wagon heavily loaded with something we quite couldn’t make out. As she got closer, we could see there were several boxes in the wagon which were obviously heavy. Arriving at the edge of the test pit, she said, “I have all these cancelled checks in these boxes, and I need to get rid of them. Do you suppose it would be all right if I just dumped them in and you buried them in this pit?” An unusual request to say the least! Our crew looked at one another for a moment, but before we could reply to the ques- tion, she dumped the first box, with hundreds of cancelled checks, probably originating from some long-gone business, falling into the bottom of the pit. After a moment of stunned silence, we all agreed the paper would probably eventually decompose and shouldn’t be hazard, so the other boxes of checks were dumped in and soon covered by 15 feet of soil backfill. Considering when this incident happened, “shredding” all that paper was not a readily available option. So, burial in the test pit was probably not a bad solution to her problem, as thought of by this “lady with the checks”. Jeremy Jeremy Wire may be contacted via e-mail to michele@worldwidedrillingresource.com ! " # ! 25 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® MARCH 2018