Salerno Oasis

I walk by this area every day without giving it much thought, but the other day, for some reason, it caught my attention. It seems to be kind of an oasis hidden between the power plant and some office buildings and some living quarters. Nice palm trees and in amongst the trees some kind of building ruin. It looks like a old mud hut, some one referred to it as the thrown. It may have been an old out house, I'm not sure.

Yesterday morning around noon the paving contractor came in and requested that I go with him to the project. This was about the 4th or 5th time he had been in that morning. The first couple times was because he couldn't get his trucks through the gate on to the base. Which is pretty much a problem every day for the contractors. The 3rd time he came in was because he had something else for me to look at on the job. When I went with him to the site, we were walking along and I noticed a cable on the edge of the road that had been cut/ripped. I picked it up and asked him about it, and he said, "Oh yeah, my driver said something about hitting a cable". This cable was right in front of the Communications building, so my first thought was that half the base was without telephones or computer connections. I went and got the comm folks to check it out and we were lucky, it was an old cable no longer in use.

After that, walking up the road towards where the grader was working, I noticed another, bigger cable cut right behind where the grader had been. This one looked like it had about 40 copper wires in it and it was right outside one of the major operations centers on base. I didn't jump to any conclusions this time and went looking for the comm guys again. Once again, we were lucky, it was an old abandoned line.

So, when he showed up in my office a 5th time in one morning, my first thought was that my luck had run out, he hit something major this time. He told me they uncovered some steel in the road way and he needed me to look at it. When I got there these pictures show what I saw.

They had done a pretty good job of tearing up the metal and when I looked a little closer, I found a piece that looked like the edge of a cargo pallet that is used on military cargo planes. So, I had them grade some more and try to pull it up to see what was underneath the pallet. On about the third pass with the grader, I could see what looked like a pretty good sized hole, that the grader tire was about to fall into. We got him stopped and backed off the hole before going in. After looking closer we could see it was an old ditch that had been covered by two pallets. The ditch was about 18" wide by 18-24" deep and lined with stones.

Why someone left this 10 foot section of the ditch and decided to cover it with cargo pallets before gravelling the road was puzzling. We removed the pallets and filled in the rest of the ditch with rock.

Up until this day, I had not been able to convince the contractor to scrape the road down before paving. He would always put the sub base material on the road to get the correct cross slope, then add the 6" of base coarse (crushed gravel) and then the 4" of asphalt on the top, building the road up close to a foot or more in some places. On this road it was important that he not build up the road, so I have told him probably a dozen times to cut it down 6" (15 cm, they work in metric) before building it back up. It worked, but too well, now he's cutting down 12-18" in places and hitting cables and finding buried ditches.