Soil Testing at our Housing Site

Back to work…

After returning from my 3-week stint in the hinterland, I finally made it back to Trinco and was able to get back to work. The main project that I am working on is a housing and livelihood project in two villages north of Trinco, Thiriyai (sounds like teary-eye) and Kattakullam. We are beginning construction of 100 homes, several domestic and community wells, and road improvements. These people were affected by the Tsunami but their story goes much deeper than that. Most of the people in this village were displaced one or more times in the 80s and 90s due to the conflict in Sri Lanka. Many fled to India as war refugees and eventually returned to Sri Lanka only to live in refugee camps. Many of the refugees from this village were placed in a camp that was located very near the sea and have lived there for approximately 10 years. The conditions in the refugee camps can be quite poor with minimal shelter given by simple block wall or corrugated steel buildings with cadjan (palm leave) roofs. The 26th December 2004 Tsunami only seemed to add insult to injury for these people.

I have included some pictures of the soil-sampling program to get soil bearing values for foundation design.

Mobile drill rig and support truck.

The vehicle is called a crew cab. They are pretty common here and we have one for our project too. Its actually the vehicle I am driving around in this week. They are fun to drive!

The drilling tool is pretty simple but does just about everything that big rig would be able to do. It has a cathead with two speeds for driving the hammer and hoisting the drill string. They drive a split spoon sampler by dropping a weighted hammer from a specified height (for my geo-geek friends..cough..jim…cough).
The soil was really loose sand and the hole was not staying open so they used bentonite slurry to keep the hole open. Screwed up my plans for grabbing a water sample…

Our site office: Eating lunch and trying to stay cool with the project coordinator and field officers. The office is lacking some furnishings.

We had difficulty finding a standing building in these villages of some 500 families that we could use for our site office. Finally, we had to rent a mostly finished house that was built be another local NGO that did not have the funds to complete it. The owner was not staying in the house as it was not finished (no doors and windows) so he was happy to have some income generation. We also offered to complete the house for him as part of the deal. Unfortunately, we cant seem to find the owner to pay rent as he left to the Vanni (LTTE controlled area) due to the recent events in the district (for example...).