Day No. 3, Rescue 313 – It was a beautiful day for our third day of prep-work… the sun came out… no rain here in Palmer and in the low 70’s for heading to the worksite and repositioning equipment.
Erik was able to get a tractor and driver to move our trailers around… we had use of a Gradall early in the day to move some pallets and wooden steps into place for easy access to the work deck, and later in the day Airport Equipment Rental delivered a smaller Genie-lift to us for our use over the next few days.
Late in the afternoon we caught up with Rusty Pochatko… he had brought us some used shipping crates from the Alaska RR Maintenance Shops to use or reconfigure into sizes more suitable for our purposes. Rusty also has lent us several tables and chairs along with some power tools… and then Rusty had to bring out the “goodies”… some fresh Caribou sticks… and some of his fresh caramelized smoked salmon bits…. OMG, those went quite well with a couple of beers to cap off a long and tiring day.
At this point we have three trailers… actually 4… on site… plenty of tools… a motor-home with generator… tables and chairs for the inventorying and a few comfort features, all of which have turned out even better than I had planned. We have a better set-up for weather than we thought we would… and we are pretty sure we will have some “weather” in the area over the next few days and the seasons are definitely beginning to change.
The rest of the Team is just about in the air and on the way as I am writing this… we will be picking them up around 5:30 this afternoon at Stevens Airport in Anchorage… 9:30 eastern time. Today we will be gathering some finger-food for in the motor-home… more packing materials… and getting with Erik to get more of the parts out of other storage lockers… parts which need to be carefully wrapped and protected.
Tomorrow will begin the real work, which will continue for the next 4-5 days…. All-in-all I’m pretty happy with how our setup has come together, thanks to the assistance from Pat and the 557 crew, Erik and some of Shane Durand’s crew, Rusty and the AKRR Shops, Pat and Travis with Airport equipment Rental, the awesome food service at the restaurant here at the Eagle Hotel and Donnie Rosie and Tonya lending a hand and covering the photos and interviews….
Tom and Carl checking out and opening the container that holds the major portion of the A-313 that has been stored there for several years.
….everyone has been very helpful and gone out of their way to make it possible for us to accomplish our mission in a timely manner…. and we have needed every bit of the time we had planned for.
The next few days are going to get a little hectic… so here we go kids! Stay tuned!
Carl W
