Just Like Woodstock

Day 6 on the site and it is a quagmire. This picture is two days old and does not show the effect of last nights rain that turned the dusty "roads" in the fields into greasy mud strips that are swallowing vehicles. The excavating teams are doing their best to dump gravel and other stuff down to make it easier for pedestrians and construction equipment to move around.

As far as I can tell, we are mostly on schedule which is amazing given the timing constraints and the hundreds of laborers that are working on top of each other around the clock. The pace and the pressure are taking a toll however. Those who have been here night and day are starting to drop. It is a constant fight for those people who have to make critical decisions.

Even for me, who is not one of the key decision makers and who goes home most every night (putting in only 12-14 hour days) feels the cumulative effect. My knees are stiff and swollen and my left ear (the one with the radio ear bud) is sore and achy. I received my first injury this morning due to fatigue and inattention. I leaned over the planning desk in the construction trailer and smacked my head into a strip of fly paper that I had hung up yesterday. The subsequent jerk left a hank of gray hair hanging up with the corpses of yesterday's flies.

We have just 26 hours to finish everything up and turn the keys over to the EM producers. It's going to be a nail biter right down to the end.

Oh yeah, we are supposed to receive another 12 hours of rain and thunderstorms starting this afternoon.