Summer projects at SJC--Updated

When school lets out, SJC begins a variety of summer improvements and maintenance projects. A high visibility project this year will be work on the water tower. (If you drive through the campus area, you may find that you may have to detour because the road by the water tower may be closed.) The work has begun, but high winds on Tuesday kept workers off the tank. The ladder hanging down from the tank was blowing in the wind and was an odd sight.

This tank is a replacement tank that was installed nine years ago, in 2002. For some pictures of its installation, see here.

Another water project at SJC is work on the reflecting pond. It has been partially drained and workers were dredging sludge from the bottom on Tuesday. The central fountain needs extensive repair, partly due to age but partly due to the ice that has in the past been allowed to build up in the winter. Recently the college has turned the fountain off in the winter to prevent that sort of damage, but the ice can be quite impressive if they do not. Here are some pictures of the ice from the winter of 2002-2003.

If they would remove the carp, which is what goldfish are, from the pond, they would have less sludge to clean up every few years.

Another big project is tuck pointing McHale Hall. I think I saw some scaffolding there last week, but did not get close enough to take a picture. This week it was gone.

The small trees that last week's tornado blew down have been removed, leaving stumps. There are about the same number of stumps here as by the tennis courts, where several old trees were removed during the school year. I hope SJC has been planting as many trees as they have been removing lately.

The big, downed tree south of McHale is still there, but fenced off.

I am hoping that there will be some other, non-SJC construction news later today, work that was supposed to be done last week.

Update: I went out to SJC this morning and got the kind of pictures I wanted yesterday--men at heights. First, the tuckpointing on McHale:

But at much greater heights were three guys pressure washing the water tank.

On this picture the guy washing the tank is using the permanent ladder, but he later switched to the other ladder, the one that was dangling in the wind yesterday.

It is moments like these when I wish I had a better camera.