It was Peter

I have had fun at work this week. We are renovating the basement of an acreage house and along with that job we are also cleaning the yard. That means tearing down all the old fences and getting rid of the piles of junk that were left behind when the last person moved out. A great deal of the junk is wood, so the easiest way to get rid of that is to burn it, so this week my job has been to manage some controlled fires. We have been using burning barrels mostly. We have a rather large clearing devoid of grass that we used to burn a pile of wood on Tuesday. It has been pretty good, and getting the area cleaned up has been nice to see - the entire property looked awful with all of this random junk sitting around, including an old Dodge Ram van (more on that later). The non-wood junk was gathered into a rather large pile and we are just waiting for a dumpster to be delivered so we can get rid of it.
Yesterday we got to work and someone (not me) got in the bobcat and started making more piles of wood to be ready to burn. It was quite windy yesterday so we couldn't actually burn anything, at least according to our burn permit, but there were still piles of wood and junk behind the house that we could gather, a few more fences to remove, that sort of thing. At one point the bobcat operator decided to take the ashes from the previous day's fire and move them, mostly just to make the yard look that much better.
An interesting thing about smoldering embers is that they often look like harmless ashes. I watched as the bobcat scooped up the ashes and dumped them on the garbage pile where they would be scooped up later when we had the dumpster. He then went around the other side of the building to collect more piles of junk. I went inside to talk to Jeff, see how he was doing. I think I had something else to do quick as well, it doesn't really matter. While inside Jeff tells me that he had found out that we can't burn anything today because of the wind, and then he asks me if we had started a fire because he thought he could smell something. We hadn't, and I told him that it was probably just the smell of the ashes that "the bobcat operator" had stirred up.
I then went outside and said "oh crap" and calmly walked over to where the bobcat was. After getting his attention I leaned in close to the bobcat's window and said "we should probably go put out the fire that is burning on the garbage pile." He didn't believe me at first, but it was completely true. There were large flames coming out of the pile of garbage, and there was no way we could just let it burn itself out, so we get the bobcat and dump piles of dirt on it to smother the flames, and spread out the pile somewhat to help prevent pockets of fire from smouldering without our seeing them. We also grabbed a hose and tried to spray it down, but the hose had so many holes in it that it looked like one of those sprinkler hoses, but it wasn't. We found another hose that worked and I spent an hour just spraying down that pile, soaking everything.
The rest of the day was less exciting but still fun, moving junk with a bobcat and, well, finding creative ways to hurt ourselves (that part wasn't quite so much fun). I guess the moral of the story is work doesn't have to boring, and also that it is good to have lots of rain in the days before you set a pile of garbage on fire because then the surrounding grass is too wet to burn.
Stay tuned, another chapter of "Fools Of Us All" should be up soon.