Building a Retaining Wall: Day 6

Today the blaster are coming and they fill the quiet morning air with the magical sounds of huge rock drills, pneumatic rock splitters and jackhammers. 

The blasters we normally use are a company from Bowen Island called Metro Blasting. They started the day off by drilling large holes in the bedrock so that they could use the pneumatic splitter.

While the blasters where all over our work place Mike got started on demolishing the scaffolding. Safely of course as there are people all over the site working on various things. 

Here is a shot of the blaster as they start to break some large pieces of rock free. This has been determined to a suitable location for one of the trees and we much reach a appropriate depth for the rootball to fit. 

Mike has several sections of scaffold to remove so the work is long and painstaking. Being built with a high level of skill the scaffold meets and exceeds WCB regulations for nailing and support material. This means there is a heck of a lot of nails to remove :)

While Mike and the blasters are busy working I tried to keep away from the noise buy heading up to the wood pile and pre-cut some pieces for the next rows. There was a lot of smaller pieces this row because of the dead man beams. 

The blaster used a 6' drill bit to reach the bedrock underneath the wall giving it 3-4 feet of bedrock for each dowel.

Underneath the house close to the retaining wall we are going to be forming a concrete walkway to the mechanical room. There is a large section of rock directly in the path so the blasters use the pneumatic rock splitter to break it apart. 

The blasters are done and they have left 2 holes large enough for the root balls on our trees...

And a massive mess :(

We set about clearing the rock and debris and moving to a corner of the house that need a rock pile for rainwater runoff. 

Several hours later we have 2 cleaned out holes.

Once the blasters drilled the holes for our dowels we stuffed the holes with some cedar bows to stop debris from clogging them up.

Here is the pile of rock we dragged across the site.

And here is the rest of the pile. Tomorrow we are hoping that the epoxy coated rebar that we ordered will be delivered and we can grout the dowels in place. Then we can stack the rest of the wall over top of our holes.