We're now under a "stop work" order for any tower work, due to safety issues noted by our crew. After a discussion with the president of Samortecnica, with Jose Palma translating, it appears that guy wire tensions have been set by "feel", which is not up to US standards, even though design documents do exist that specify the working tension. Also, "saddles" to secure the guy wires have not been installed properly, leading at least one guy wire to become totally loose. This issue was not resolved. The next step will be a further discussion on Monday with a person from Samortecnica who speaks English. Our current thinking is for work on the tall towers to continue to be performed by the INEGI crew. (They plan to work on the last 60m tower on Tues.)
In the meantime, a bit of work was done:
- Installed a Litebeam at the ops center that is working as a primary access point
- All of our CSATs are now back to functioning.
- Soil sensors installed at 2 sites (tnw09 and rse06)
- Prep work: putting all boxes on mounting plates, assembling top guys
With networking going, found that we could connect to tse13 and tse07. tse07 needed a reboot to allow logins, for some reason and now is fully functioning. Found that tse13 sensors weren't reporting, even though everything else was fine. Turns out that there are no SHTs installed in the housings – I could have sworn that we checked that (several times). Installed the 2m, but couldn't do more due to climbing restriction.
Over the weekend, we'll have a light workload doing what we can on the ground.