Wednesday, February 03, 2021

Impossible

 Kadizzle likes studying the sites of native Americans, but, and it is a big but.  You cannot get anything done simply on Forest Service land without an archaeology study.  Our old friend Dave died when he fell from a ladder a couple months ago. The trail crew wants to memorialize Dave with a bench overlooking the lake.  Seems real simple, but just to put a bench in the ground is a massive paperwork undertaking.  As a trail crew regulations become a real mess.  The most insane are the wilderness regulations. When we work on trails in the wilderness, we cannot use anything but ancient tools.  This means a tree that could be removed from the trail with a chainsaw in minutes will take an hour with an old fashioned buck saw.  To some extent this is a good regulation. Who wants to hear chain saws when they are in the " Wilderness"? Like all laws this could use some tuning.  If we were allowed for one or two months in the spring to use mechanized equipment, we could accomplish so much.  Of course when there is a forest fire all bets are off, chainsaws are fine, helicopters, four wheelers, you name it.  Common sense is not something well tolerated by the federal government.  

This all bring up an incident back in the days when Kadizzle was a surface coal miner.  Some brilliant bureaucrat came up with the idea mining companies should only be able to blast four hours a day.  This was to give some comfort to people living near large surface mines.  In the Eastern United States it is the overburden that has to be blasted.  The overburden may be one hundred feet thick solid rock.  To load the blast hole may take three days.  Once the holes are loaded one massive blast takes place.  However, in North Dakota the coal is blasted, not the overburden.  To keep the process moving you have to blast a couple times a day with small blast to break up the coal.  The Mine Health and Safety Administration would bring our operation to a halt if we cannot blast all day long.  The mine inspector told Kadizzle he had to publish a blast schedule saying which four hours we would blast.  Kadizzle came up with a plan so we could blast for eight hours.  Kadizzle published a schedule that said we would blast every other 15 minutes starting at 8 A.M.  That meant we would never be delayed more than 15 minutes.  It added up to four hours.  The inspected did not know what to do.  That is the nature of stupidity.  Sometimes there is a way to beat it.  One major problem with any law is it make make very good sense in one part of the world and be insane in another. 

No comments: