Doing Good Work

 What a week.  Just in the last couple of days, a new challenge popped up at work.  With all the rain the project area received, it was not surprising to have water ponding in the natural areas.  At first, though, the major challenge was simply not to get the equipment stuck.  However, as most of the area began to dry (there's been sunshine for a whole week!) we started to notice that many pools or puddles remained.  Suddenly, we realized that those that remained were likely not just due to wet conditions, but probably should be classified as "vernal pools."  This was new, and opened a huge can of worms.

Vernal pools, along with other types of wetlands, require a 300' buffer around them, inside of which no equipment may penetrate.  This put enormous restrictions on where drill points could be placed, as well as travel lanes to get to them.  So, Monday morning we began moving points.  TOC and its contractor were not very happy about this.  Some people tried to convince us it wasn't that important.  They wanted to be sure the drills could keep working, since they are production-based.  However, we knew that not only did we need to make this decision for the safety of our backsides, but also for theirs.  Vernal pool and wetland mitigation is not cheap.

By Monday afternoon, we had moved all the points necessary to finish the day's assigned production.  Someone who had earlier tried to get us to lower our standards finally said, "Good work, Bios.  All the drills are running."  It sure was nice to hear.