The city deployments were pretty interesting. There was the traffic, the heat,
losing track of where you were on the map, explaining our purpose and convincing
the people whose yard you were about to place and instrument in that it really
wasn't a bomb over and over again, and figuring out what to do when the maps
didn't match reality. If we'd have done this experiment a century or so ago
we wouldn't have had these problems.
Some of the deployment lines went right through downtown areas. In some cases instruments had to be placed in places like planters inside restaurants inside buildings like the one in the pictures below.
There was always plenty of traffic.
Taking a break.
"According to the map this street is supposed to continue into the neighborhood where we are supposed to start deploying. Where did this wall come from??"
Below is a picture of the mountains that were to the south of the Caracas Valley. The Caracas Long Profile deployment stretched from the coast to these mountains.
The Venezuelans were pretty busy people. They were in the process of building a railroad line through the mountains south of Caracas. And I mean through them. I must have seen at least a dozen tunnels in the area where we were deploying. The longest tunnel was over 6 kilometers long. The day we were there deploying instruments it was closed because of construction work. It took over an hour, with a large chunk of the distance by autopista (expressway), to get from the area at one end of the tunnel to the area near the other end so we could continue deploying. The train that was to use the system of tunnels and bridges was going to be carrying automobiles and trucks. The organization that was putting all of this together was Ferrocar. Below is a picture of just one of the tunnels and the machine used to build it.
Some of the tunnels were finished, but none of the track had been laid in the area where we were. There were also many long and high trestles yet to be built to connect the tunnels together. It's was a pretty impressive project.
2018-02-08