Last Summer

On the off chance my kids read this blog someday I thought I'd include one post to describe what I did the summer of 2006.

I worked as an intern for the Division of Water Resources (DWR). We designed, and Gerber construction built, a new and improved spillway for the Red Butte Dam up Red Butte Canyon. I actually joined the process midway through; DWR had completed the design and construction began just before I came into the picture.

I spent the summer verifying that the construction company followed the engineer's drawings (fancy way to say I worked as in inspector). For those of you new to the construction business inspectors don't have the best rap in the industry -- they are known for sitting in their trucks while the construction workers die in the heat and only leaving the blessing of their air conditioning to inform the construction workers of a mistake.

I did my best to buck the trend. I worked with the construction guys, against policy but I did it anyway, and did my best to deliver a nice glass of water when needed.

Below I've posted a picture of two DWR engineers and myself -- from left to right: me, BJ and Lee. As you can see Lee is sitting on the spillway (the structure used to release water from the reservoir when water elevations are too high). I am using a handy dandy instrument called a nuclear density gage. It determines soil density by sending a probe 6 or 8 inches into the dirt, releasing some radiation and then measuring how long the radiation takes to return to the probe.


Most days I spent 6 - 8 hours at the site. We saw moose, rattlesnakes (the construction workers ate them -- no joke), deer and other wildlife. I took notes of all the activities, held responsibility for anything that went wrong, kept a photo journal and performed necessary on the fly engineering calculations (we engineers love that "calculation" word). Sounds like fun, no???