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This is me at work in my new job. I have been learning to be a survey/setting-out Engineer on one of the biggest development projects in the country. We are building a massive new barracks for the M.O.D. here in the town I live in, Colchester, Essex, Britain. I am currently setting out the drainage. |
This is an example of the kind of drawing we have to work with. Loads of lines and figures and stuff. We work from the co-ordinates and put pegs in the ground to show the guys doing the building where things go. We also have to interprete the drawing and give them information such as the size of manholes, gradients of the pipes and things like that.
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This is the device we use to find the positions for everything on the ground. It's called an EDM or total-station. We shoot a laser at known points and the device then knows where it is by measuring the distance and angles. Then we type in co-ordinates and it tells us which direction to point and then we shoot at something to find the distance until we have located the point.
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Here you can see the buttons and stuff. It has all kinds of functions and is theoreticaly accurate to 1mm...but in practice it's never that accurate. For what we are currently doing it is sufficient though. The only drawback of this system is the fact that you can only set it up where you can see your known points and it takes a while to set up. We will be getting a GPS system soon which is a lot faster.
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Here you can see them digging a hole for a manhole. The thing inside the hole is called shuttering, and are there to stop the sides collapsing and causing mayhem.
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Here you can see one of the manholes they built. This is one of the deepest so far, about 5m deep. This is for a sewage pipe run. It is only half built here, there are smaller manhole rings going on top after to bring it up to the finished ground level.
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Here you can see one of the sewage pipes. They are quite small compared to the pipes where the rain water goes...it rains a lot here, as most people know. This pipe is about a foot across...the rain water pipes are over a meter wide and made of concrete.
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Here they are filling the hole back in. Sometimes there are junctions in the pipes and we have to record their position with our EDM before they fill the holes back in. This can be quite tricky, because the guys don't want to stop what they are doing for more than a few seconds. But it is vital, as we need to know where they are for when the rest of it is built. Once everything is buried it is impossible to tell where it is other than using the co-ordinates and depths we have measured..
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This is Ian, the guy who has been teaching me. He has become a good friend as well as a great guy to work with, even though he has tantrums sometimes...hehehe. He has been pushing me very hard. We are easily the hardest working Engineers on site and we need to be. The drainage gang are fantastic workers and we expect to finish months ahead of schedule. We hardly have a moment to breath with them. It is certainly high pressure work but both Ian and I enjoy that. We usualy put in at least 12hrs a day, and we only stop to eat a late breakfast for about 10-15 minutes. My longest day so far has been 15hrs, which is perfect for me. Anything less than 12hrs and I don't feel tired when I get home.
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