New pics!

Here are a bunch of photos that I took with a spare camera I brought just in case something happened to my digital. They had to be scanned so the resolution may not be that great, but there something new.

Here are some pictures pouring the concrete in the roof of the tank. This is I feel where I used my engineering most so far. I had to make sure that the reinforcing steel was at the right level and the cement was properly placed. You can see in this photo I have a trowel and hammer to make sure the cement gets under and around all the steel and there is no air pockets.

To make the top you first make a really big table inside the tank. This supports the weight of workers and cement before it dries. Then you put up boards on the outside to act as walls to keep the cement in. You can see the table top that I´m standing on above.

This series of pictures (I don´t know what happened with the last one.) Roughly shows how you mix concrete in Panama, or any place where you don´t have a concrete mixer. First you mix you sand, gravel and cement when its dry. Then you make a "volcano" out of this and slowly add water to the top of the volcano. After waiting for a while so the water can seep down you mix it and begin to open the volcano up. Eventually if done properly the is no more liquid water just wet cement that won´t spill out. If done improperly the water can spill out and take much cement with it.
We built this roof to cover the cop because it poured a few times during construction. We didn´t want the cement to get to watery.

This is a different tank. In my town we have two aqueduct tanks. The first is higher and older and works fine. The second is less than a year old and is lower, and has several small leaks. The aqueduct committee has been meaning to fix this for a while but had no funds to buy the cement and sand needed. I got about 6 bags of cement from the US Army as they were leaving, and worked out a deal where the community would carry fine sand for a house being built down the road, where cars couldn´t got in exchange for some of the fine sand.

These pictures are of the first day of work where we chiseled a hole in the wall for a drain cleanout (the tank had none) and then washed the sand and gravel filter inside. It was almost like being in one of those water playgrounds at a waterpark.