Back of the front

It's just gone over Whangaparaoa. Very heavy rain with a dose of thunder and lightening.
I had the great pleasure of needing to drive to Glenfield and back this morning. Coming back was very unpleasant driving conditions. Needing to reduce speed on the motorway due to low viz and surface water.

To my amazement, there were three sets of traffic management on Whangaparaoa Rd and the Hibiscus Coast Highway. On the Hib Highway, I kid you not, guys are weed-eating the berm with two attenuators behind them. It was absolutely pissing down, limit viz and a substantial amount of surface water. This is on a duel carriageway. The berm was by no means over-grown - did not need weed-eating. I'm struggling to come up with a more stupid idea for jeapodising safety for a pointless job than that. It would have taken them 30 seconds to hope in the trucks, pull off the road and go down to the local pie shop and wait for the weather to blow over.

The first lot of TM on Whanga Rd was a lane closure (duel carriageway) so they can install a new cell phone mast. Luckily they did the crane and lifting operations yesterday, but I do wonder at the logic of installing a cell phone mast in a thunder storm. Not sure what the second lot of TM was on Whanga Rd, it was just around the corner and maybe 700m along from the first one. Possibly a competition to see how many cones they can put out.

I assume that scheduling jobs, booking TM and coordinating all the trades etc is such a ball-ache no project manager or site supervisor is game to cancel work due to weather that makes the site dangerous, even with substantial warning like today's weather. The paradox that it is so hard to arrange TM to make you site safe that you then continue working in unsafe conditions is not lost on me.