Geoprobe sample

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Geoprobe demo

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Sampling a gas station ditch near Orange

A colleague had to climb down and collect soil and water that appeared to be contaminated by product leaching into the pit.
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PST installation in Port Arthur

Tank being buried at gas station under construction. The water needs to be pumped out and the tanks will be pressure tested, buried, and hooked up to the dispensers. It was hot as balls out at like 930 in the morning.
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Flat ass Midland

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Midland's a weird place. The two times I've been there, it's either been dry and very cold or dry and very hot. There's a lot of money there right now, with more jobs than people supposedly. I talked with some dudes that got their CDL after high school and started making 60 grand a year immediately driving trucks on oil fields. Not a bad gig for 19 or 20 year olds, but there's not much to spend money on out there either. The city Wiki led me to some pretty interesting revelations, for example, the one religious tv station in the city (jewish), or the creepy fates of the two dudes mainly credited with rescuing Baby Jessica (who apparently had a baby herself in the recent past, damn I feel old). The best places to eat there, I've found, are:
* Wall Street (on Wall Street) - Great steaks and fresh seafood.
* Luigi's - Decent italian with cheap drinks.
* Fabelas - Between Midland and Odessa. A lunch diner for all the workers in nearby facilities with great homemade mexican food, etc.

Downtown Midland

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Dyed springs

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Opening artesian well

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Introducing dye into monitoring well above Comal Springs

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Comal springs at Landa Park, New Braunfels

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Asarco protest

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El Paso Smelter Granted Air Quality Permit

Flurries

I went up to the flatlands again for work, mostly for site inspections but also to drop by and check on a well on my last site there and make sure we hadn't broken it when sampling this past summer. The investigation involved pulling the well, an operation that I hadn't seen before. They get a truck with an extendable boom that reaches up high and drops a hook to pull out the PVC pipe that the water comes up through in 20 foot sections. The hook attaches to a clamp with rings that slips below the threaded joints that hold the sections together. At the bottom is a motorized pump. In this instance, there was a power line that descended down taped to the site of the PVC. Turns out, the motor was blown.

This and another site were located close to the airport. On our way to look into some old records, we got to have a escorted drive inside the fenced-in runway area, complete with a Maverick-style race against a Southwest passenger jet landing across the way. Weather-wise, it was the complete opposite of the last time I was in the true "windy city." Even though it didn't snow until Thursday, it actually felt much colder on Tuesday. Overcast and very blustery, 20-30 F, 20-30 mph gusts. The next two days were also cold and windy but the sun warmed everything up a bit and I had picked up a sock hat and gloves from Walmart that helped tremendously.

We ate at a place called el Tejavan ("the shed"), which featured jalisco interior style Mexican food. For starters, the red table sauce was very tasty, a little thin, plenty of bite. I ordered the chilaquiles with red chile beef stew, which were served in large proportions and with a great red chile sauce. The beef was decent but the fried tortilla pieces were too chewy to really enjoy, and I regretted not going after the Pastor plate. I'll have to get that next time I go up. I also tried the ceviche, tasted very fresh, outstanding.

Amarillo in white

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Should I drink ze pe?

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Lookin out my back door

At our sample staging area next to a beer distributor. They have a artificial waterfall built into the side of the building. Weather is much better today on our second sampling day and looks to remain nice for the duration. I'm basically here to help out with paperwork and organization, tag and bag samples, and learn more about this type of event.

We're somewhere between Midland and Odessa, or slow-deatha as some locals call it. West Texas is pretty gd flat!
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What do we know?

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Work dinner at saltgrass

Good times but Saltgrass sucks!

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Work Halloween Costume Contest

The five finalists: bee (in police uniform with toy guitar - she's a big Sting fan), female astronaut in diapers (how topical!), witch and toad, trrp monster, and baggy the bi-sacktual robot. The astronaut won.
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Hot as Hello by Morning

I visited beautiful Amarillo this week for a work project. I took a few snaps with my camera phone; Amarillo smells about like these pictures look. Most of my time was spent in a wide open pasture with no shade and a hot wind that made it feel like I was standing in a blowdryer. The flights were extremely crowded but thankfully short; airlines are just getting shittier and shittier with no sign of stopping. Blegh. Still, it was a fun trip, much better than sitting in the office all week.

This was actually the second day out in the field. Here we are using a large trailer-mounted air compressor to purge and sample a monitoring well. This specific type had a pump submerged at the bottom that only needed high pressure compressed air to pump water - Bennett Sample Pumps are themselves made in Amarillo. Most wells with dedicated pumps require a source of electricity to run. Some wells necessitate a separate pump that is lowered into the well only when it is time to withdraw water.

This was Day 3, gauging and GPSing a monitoring well that has its own dedicated electric pump. We didn't actually sample this well, but gauging the depth to water at this well and at least two others allowed us to establish the groundwater gradient in the area.

This was a nice little note left by one of the landowners. Scavenger hunt, indeed.

This was a colorful, mucho interior mexican mural on the side of a work semi parked at one of the places we sampled. I did find a few things about a town called Huejúcar, in Jalisco. Looks like a nice enough place.

All in all it was an enjoyable trip, plenty of challenges, but we did get to stay in a fairly nice hotel. We didn't eat anywhere that spectacular, mostly because by the end of the day we were usually too wiped out from the heat to get too ambitious.