After Digging

Tidying Up

You have sent the machines home. You may well have had enough yourself, any volunteer you had may have gone, or you may have had to say “Thanks. You go home. I’ll finish off” out of kindness. You will have pre-warned the landowner that you might not be able to get things tidy immediately, but it will get done as soon as possible. So, you do as much as possible there and then and the rest the next morning. It can be more important to get someone to help you with this than with the digging. Gates have to be checked and closed at the time, if you can’t remember if a gate was open or closed then close it.

Walk the whole route. Make a mental list at least, of the jobs to do. The priority now is still not that join you want to get done, it is tidying the field. Do jobs in order of importance to the farmer. Take all spare bits of duct away, including markers. Then move on to rocks and stones and putting bits of turf back, stamping on any high bits, digging to remove the odd rock. Take rocks somewhere completely out of the way, preferably out of sight – they blend in well in becks. Stones is the main complaint after digging/ploughing – the conker size stones are worst, they can ping about and damage farm machinery such as balers. Muddy areas may have to be left alone, it may not be possible to improve them. Drums of duct should at least get moved to near a gateway ready for collection. Any ends of duct or coils of duct sticking out of the ground should be tidy. A coil needs to be left flat on the ground, this seems to be enough to stop sheep from interfering with it. Some debate as to whether you should tape the coil up – if it is a long coil then certainly, but if is short then it may be better not taped as an animal can’t so easily get its feet caught in it. Inspect it carefully when you proceed to use it next time. 16mm is easier to damage than 7mm.

See the farmer as soon as possible. Thank him. Ask his opinion. Be seen to be acting on any of his suggestions. And as soon as you can.

Contact any helpers you had to thank them. Arrange payment for diggerman if you haven’t already. Get a map of what you have done drawn as soon as possible. Look at your own stocks of duct, tape, joiners, etc to see if you need to get more. Buy some more gloves.

Learn. Did anything go wrong? Or nearly go wrong. Why? What could be improved? Learn.

Re-plan. Did you achieve what you wanted? What is the next phase?

Tidying up, also includes looking round after B4RN have been. An operation such as core blowing can result in 3 or 4 people spread out over a mile of hillside and things can get a bit complicated and holes left unfilled or spare bits of duct left around.

Q So how do leave the spur? Cut off for joiner to be used, or coiled up on the surface, or buried?

A If it's going to be joined up within a month say then you might leave the remaining duct as a coil flat on the ground, ready to move on. This depends on the likelihood of damage. We mainly have sheep here, they cause surprisingly little damage, but you would still inspect it before you continued with it. It biodegrades in sunlight but a couple of months is okay. (If it looks bleached out, then the sunlight did get to it, so replace it)

More likely you would leave a short end a metre or so long sticking out the ground, which would ideally be somewhere sensible like near a wall. The end would be taped up with duck type tape (not electrical tape) - do not tape a loop, just leave a dangly end.

If you are continuing the spur then a joint is not a problem, just don't join on a bend.

Eventually you may decide that it may be a year before the duct will be continued, so you may cut it down to a short visible stub. In this case a proper stop-end could be a good idea, but that still needs tape round it.

Or it may be clear that this end will never be used, in which case it needs a stop-end (taped up) and gets buried. You then need to figure out some means of locating the end in a few decades time. B4RN do not seem to have a system for this. Invent your own. A map. A description. A photo of each one. A lump of metal buried with it so you can at least find it with a metal detector.

Quality Control

So you have done that section, saw every metre number disappear into the ground, seemingly undamaged and at a decent depth.

You can’t see every bit that gets dug in, some farmer insists he is competent and just puts his in the ground, some other farmer sub-contracts his section and they do it between them without telling anyone. (In the first case they moleploughed a 7 and the 16 separately in two adjacent lines to the chamber. In the second case they should have used 50m of protective outer duct in a rocky section, which was fairly obvious and sure enough it caused fibre-blowing problems.)

Someone has to walk all the sections and be brave enough to tell the person responsible to tidy a few bits up. Here’s a real example from a year ago of our quality control officer in action sending the following e-mail. (A bit tough maybe, but these things would never have got sorted otherwise.)

Xxx wants about 6 lumps of concrete removed (she will deal with all the other rubble) (don’t just chuck them in the river like Yyy was doing yesterday)
There is that bit of exposed black duct East of the gill there that needs burying
The bit above Aaa Farm needs redoing, it should really go under the wall a few metres North, or you might be able to bodge it with about 10 bags of concrete where it is
At this point the plough has cut through the earth wires to the electricity pole and there are now a load of broken metal ends sticking up in the air. BT and Norweb need to be unaware of our passing (so do farmers and sheep).
Just round the corner there is a big pile of rock, obviously dumped from our work. That needs at least turning into a tasteful rockery.
a field further on, at the point where the ploughing ends it is too far South. Crossing that gill will be really tricky there having to span the beck. It needs to be 10 metres further North where the gill is different and a metal pole can be buried in the ground.

That was dealing with another volunteer, but what do you do with a farmer who has put the duct across his own land and it needs a bit of tweaking. You end up doing it yourself, you can’t tell him to. You can be tidying rocks away on somebody’s land that obviously doesn’t care if they are left.

Complaints

· The main complaint/comment is of stones left behind.

· Not putting a chamber exactly where they expected – we explained one away, the other one we had to reposition 3 metres from its original location.

· Some farmers are more concerned with flatness/muddiness than others. It’s simpler to wait for the ones that complain then make a visible attempt to sort it.

· Leaving a gateway on a slope muddy at the wrong time of year.

· Digging across a dirt track is going to take a little while to flatten out. You could go back with a rake or just wait.

· We left a gate open not often, but at least once.

· Gateway blocked for a long time once with a road crossing.

Customer complaints are not really our department. The idea is to give people the opportunity to get the B4RN service, whether they wish to or not is their decision. But often you have no choice but to help where you can. The more you help, the more you end up advising, and then you become partly responsible for their choice of action.

Customer complaints usually come from their misconceptions.

(Although water dripping on their carpet, coming all the way from the chamber, was clearly a legitimate complaint.)

Casterton held a "Local Audit"

" Sadly, after a network build audit we carried out recently, we now have a Pall of Shame! This shadow doesn't fall directly over the volunteers who have given up many hours of time and effort in building the network, but, due to our limited capacity to train and supervise, the build has been found to fall short of the standard to which we aspired in places. To date we have found eighteen problems and now it is the responsibility of the organising committee to remedy these issues and bring the work up to standard so that it can be signed off with pride to B4RN. To this end we shall once again be asking for volunteers to assist with filling in holes, stone gathering, reseeding and digging in ducting, this time with rather more precise instructions and objectives. Please help if you can."

"In the interests of transparency, here are just a few examples of the problems we plan to address."