Bangkok sewerage works - PART 4

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Modernising an unplanned city of this size is a big task. Services are constructed, modified and bastardised to suit each person’s needs without any proper forethought or record keeping. Electricity is a nightmare of dangling cables, spliced and respliced a thousand times to disappear into the rabbit warren of twisting alleys and make-shift buildings they call a suburb. Water can be a low pressure lottery of uncertain purity. You sure as hell didn't drink it. Telephones lines are a rarity in the slums but it seems even beggars had a mobile phone.

We were bound to hit power and water every now and then. There’s no dial-before-you-dig number in Bangkok. The BMA (Bangkok Metropolitan Authority) was supposed to tell us where their services ran but hard information was hard to pin down. After the services went in, freelance cowboys would reroute cables and pipes to suit anyone who paid them. We relied on guess work and luck not to hit anything.

Any services that were near us were sure to be found by the bloke operating the pile driver. Sheet pile cuts through just about anything if he pounds long enough. We got used to blacking out huge areas of the city.

In the nineties a large section of Bangkok didn't have sewerage at all. They eject all their waste into a system of klongs, (canals), which riddle the city like Venetian streets. As the tide ebbs and flows the waste is supposed to be flushed out to sea and fresh water takes its place. A workable affair for perhaps a third of the 15 million people who generate bodily and commercial waste every day.

Even without the overcrowding problem, the klongs were in trouble. They had silted up, been build over and around and not maintained. An impenetrable forest of shanties and skinny streets blocked equipment that needed to get in and clear them out. King tides would overrun the banks and flood large parts of the city, returning everything they had dumped into the canals previously. The city festered in its own shit.

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Bangkok sewerage works - PART 3

(Return to PART 1, PART 2)

I eventually got a 101 for the proper operation of the Unclemole in English. Hearing the instruction from an Aussie helped me put together the pieces I hadn’t been able to nut out for myself by reading the Japenglish manual. In short, it went something like this.

Dig a hole. Throw in the guide rails and drop a huge thrust wall behind them. Attach hydraulic jacks to the thrust ring and position the machine on the launch rails. Line up a laser to keep it going straight. Push the machine into the earth while rotating the cutting face. Flush the debris away from the face back to a holding tank with low pressure water. At full extension the jacks are retracted. The cables and water pipes are disconnected. A concrete pipe is placed between the machine and thrust ring and all the paraphernalia are reconnected then you push again. Eventually the machine pops out into a retrieval pit a hundred metres or so away and is removed. That section of pipe work is complete and we move on to the next pit.

Sounds easy huh?

In reality, just getting the holes dug was like that movie Mission Impossible. So that you understand the difficulty we faced, here’s some ground structure information. Bangkok is sited on a huge river delta. A lot of city structures are sitting on wooden piles sunk deep into sloppy marine sand. In places, slow moving rivers of sand and mud snake beneath the concrete and asphalt that floats on top of this mess. It can really bugger up a micro-tunneller’s day when he hits one of these rivers. He can only watch helplessly as his machine drifts away, never to be seen again.

The pit walls were under great pressure and would leak large amounts of mud and water if not sealed properly. Dewatering was a constant requirement and a major headache.

The pit, being the lowest point in a given area, would also flood with sewerage. Human and animal waste typically runs down the street to a nearby Klong in the slum areas of the city. There was no way around having to stand knee-deep in shit, needles and condoms to get the pipes in. I put great faith in the many inoculation injections I had before leaving Australia.

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Bangkok sewerage works - PART 2

(Return to - PART 1)

The company I worked for was a Malaysian family concern. All the brothers, uncles, sons and in-laws of a male persuasion were there. This arrangement guarantees everyone does whatever the hell they want and nobody gets along. A few of them resented the hell out of us Aussies being there.

They’d been tunnelling the old fashioned way for a while using the full manual labour method. Hand jacking a shield into the mud and shoving as many blokes they could fit in the pipe with shovels to dig out the face. A filthy, stinking, dangerous job. They used Thai labour.

Someone decided to get the company into the 20^th century and purchased a bunch of brand new hydraulic tunnelling machines. Thailand’s economy was booming. Trouble was they didn’t have enough family members willing to learn how to use their new machines. That’s where I came in.

I seemed a strange choice for the job of site manager on a micro-tunnelling job. Rough as guts smart-arse in my mid 20’s who had run a diamond drill rig underground a bit and worked at a gold mine as a mill operator and truck driver. This was a bit different.

The machines aren’t overly complicated to learn. I got a manual and a Japanese consultant Iseki sent over due to the size of the order. He slept a lot, spoke very little English and wasn't much use.

I reverted to the good old trial and error method. It’s the Australian way.

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Bangkok sewerage works - PART 1

An Australian mate offered me a job in Bangkok, Thailand, as a tunnelling machine operator. The Malaysian company he worked for had won part of the contract to install the sewerage system pipework. I don't know why I took it, just seemed like something different, so why not.

I’ll never forget my first day at work in this vast foreign city. Leaving the hotel with my new boss, I stepped into a nightmare of clogged streets, thick smog and incredible noise. My boss told me ‘rush hour’ cripples traffic flow for about four hours every morning and afternoon so we walked for a while until he hailed a couple of motorbike taxis.

Right, sounds dangerous, let’s do it.

His taxi-bike disappeared into the mess immediately. He hadn’t given my rider directions; he’d just said “follow me”. My rider rode flat out for a while until I realised he couldn’t find his mate and didn’t know where to go. I had no mobile phone. I didn’t have a single number to call and I didn’t even know the name of the hotel I’d left or what street it was in. My boss had picked me up from the airport fairly late the night before and I hadn’t taken any notice of these minor details. Nor did I know where the company I worked for had its head office or where any of the worksites were. I didn’t have any money or my passport.

I sat on that bike for hours. There was no way I was letting this guy dump me. He couldn’t speak English but he got the picture and stopped to make a few phone calls. Then we rode up and down a JAM PACKED highway looking for the worksite. The traffic was insane. I thought everyone else on the road was out to kill us. 15 million people live in Bangkok and most of them were on that road with us.

By pure chance my boss saw us and took his life in his hands to run out into the road, just about catching my rider in a head lock. He gave the guy a mouthful and wouldn’t pay him the fare so an argument started. I couldn’t pay, I still had Australian dollars. Before my boss could punch him out one of the Thai supervisors broke it up. He gave the poor guy some cash and settled things down. I was in a state of shock and couldn’t function too well for several hours after that.

Like it? See - PART 2.