This should really be part 2 or 3. Most of the digging was done on this site before John and I arrived from Pago Pago.
Ta'u, being the battered little island that it was, had a few abandoned things sitting around. Stanley, the pilot partially from Ofu, had a mother, Moki, that lived near the airport in Pago Pago. She had a brother that still lived in -- imagine this -- Fiti'uta, Ta'u. This was just another typical sequence of events in the Samoan islands. Matt pieced all of this together on an earlier trip. The brother of Moki, Leoso, tended the land that belonged to his family and was rebuilding the family house that was heavily damaged in the cyclone of February 2005. In the back yard of that house was an old cement cistern. While not perfect, from a seismic point of view, it became our prime candidate for a station location.
A hole was knocked in the bottom of the cistern and a hole dug down into the dirt. The site looked good...as good as we were going to get with the amount of time we had. The soil was a mix of dirt and just enough rocks to be really annoying, but good for stability.
No wheelbarrow? No problem. We just mixed the cement on the steps that lead to the foundation of an older house on the land next to the cistern and hauled it to the hole with a bucket.
Similar to the site on Tutuila I pounded three pieces of rebar, that were painstakingly cut with a dull hack saw by Shaun, into the bottom of the hole and leveled them to give the barrel a place to settle.
When we were finished the barrel and cement construction looked just like the NOAA site, except that the dirt was a different color. The white square in the barrel was a marble tile which was about one inch thick. It was placed on top of the wet cement and it sank to about half of its thickness into the cement. It was also leveled with the bubble level sitting on it. The tile was there to provide a harder surface for the sensor feet to rest on.
Once we got to this point we went for a tour of the island. It was way more interesting than sitting around watching the cement dry and swatting mosquitoes.
2014-07-23