These days my morning commute is a 25 mile crawl on the freeway into downtown Houston. It usually takes about an hour, sometimes more if there's a wreck or if the weather is bad. Outside of peak hours, the journey takes about 30 minutes.
The picture below illustrates the latter phase of my morning commute while working in Brunei in 1989. Phase one was a drive to the office, phase two a drive to pick up the explosives, detonators and to the intersection of the line and the road. And this final phase of the morning commute, the hike into the jungle.
At the eastern end of the survey zone there was this series of lakes we had to cross to get from the nearest road – the seria Bypass – into the jungle. This bridging is along one of the receiver lines. The source lines ran parallel. Part of my job was to find alternate shot sites where the survey plan placed the shot site in the lake. I had to calculate offsets and fold of coverage to ensure the contractual minimums were achieved.
The three guys are part of my crew. The guy in front is carrying the Tovex – a seismic dynamite with a very high speed of detonation. They guy in the orange overalls is carrying the detonators. The bridges had been made by the bridging crews who followed the surveyors to make it easier for everyone else to hike the line and improve overall efficiency.
I don't recall if the guy in the orange overalls was my first or second driver. My first driver had previously held a position in the evidence room of the local constabulary. The reason I needed a second driver was because my first was arrested for having, in his words, ‘borrowed some items from the evidence room'.
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