lisa_photos

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INCONSISTENCIES IN CALAM TESTIMONY?   COULD BE!
Tod Landis
March 8, 2005

Shown below are photos Lisa Meyer provided as evidence for her testimony at a PUC hearing Wednesday, March 3rd,   Confirming my earlier testimony, she said her horse stumbled into a hole on Hillcrest, where CalAm was doing road work. In an email after her testimony she wrote: "the ground gave way under his hoof (duck tape busted) the base rock covering went down into the hole with the horses leg. Classic "boobi trap" style."

A CalAm representative testified that he had looked at the hole and he didn't see how a horse could stumble into it, because the pipe was only 2 inches across.

The first two pictures show the size of the hole in relation to a roadside cone. You can see that the hole is approximately the same size as the cone base--quite a bit larger than two inches.

The second picture also shows a cone and plywood that Lisa says her husband put over the hole on Saturday, after the horse stumbled. The cone has a black base, and it is clearly different from the orange bases on other CalAm cones in Photo 6.

The second picture also shows a round thing, kind of like one side of a tape dispenser, with a piece of wire attached to it. Apparently this was taped in place to block up the hole.

The CalAm representative claimed that the hole was always covered by the cone and plywood. Lisa's testimony contradicts him, and the photos back her up. The different cone color suggests that it was placed there by the Meyers, not CalAm, and plywood would not have been used to cover a hole on a road by a licensed contractor (I'm told there are standards for this kind of thing. Even if CalAm or the contractor used the plywood, they violated the standards)

The third picture is a close-up view of the hole. You can see what is apparently the two inch pipe in the hole, and that the hole was much larger then the pipe. I can't can't tell anything about the depth from the photo (Can anyone else? Any NASA scientists reading this?) but Lisa says the depth was not less than her full arm length. On the right hand side of the hole you can see two blue wires. One of the interesting questions is whether this main repair was necessary to repair leaks or simply to install a remote metering system.

Photo 4 shows erosion ocurring around a fire hydrant during the rainy season later in the year. There is a suggestion of erosion in Photo 12. More erosion and sedimentation must have occurred because of the way the CalAm contractor handled the dirt piles like the one in Photo 5. They were simply spread out over the vegetation and leaf litter covering the ground, leaving bare dirt exposed to the heavy rain.

Photo 11 may also contradict the CalAm representatives testimony. It shows trucks pulled off the road into the woods, not parked along the shoulder of the road as he testified.   It is still not clear whether the company had the owner's permission to do this. Note that Photos 10 and 11 show "Keep Out" and "No Trespassing" signs.

The pictures were taken at different times of the year. Lisa writes:

"All of the water pictures were taken during this winter storm season.
All of the cone, contractor vehicle, dirt piles, and hole shots were
taken in the summer time. I took the photos of the water because I had
never seen the water go straight through the Franks yard before. Nor had
I ever seen it take the path adjacent to the road like that. The new
hydrant is in a bit of an erosion site I would say."