A warning for other GLOBE participants
by Conor
Cummins
Hello, and welcome to the page of my great mistake!
On May 1st, 1996, I made a goofy mistake. We were drilling
holes in the soil with a soil auger so we could put down chalk to measure
the water bed. I first drilled for 10 cm, then 30. It looked something
like the picture you see on the right of this page.
I got bored while waiting for the rest of the group to put the chalk down in the hole and put the soil back in. Suddenly, I had this idea that it would be really fun to see how deep I could drill a hole into the soil. So I did. I moved a several feet away from the digging site, and began drilling in the deep grass.
Drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, drill! I drilled all the way until the auger handle was a few inches away from the ground. Then I saw it was almost time for me to drill the next hole, so I began pulling the auger up.
It didn't move.
Thinking I wasn't pulling hard enough, I tried again, but still no luck. Finally I decided the best way to get the auger out of the soil was to screw the other way.
I thought everything was all fine and dandy, until I pulled out the auger....without the drill bit.
I put part of the auger back in the hole, hoping I could get it to catch. The soil had already closed over the screw that attached the two pieces, so I was stuck.
Worse yet, it was now my turn to drill the 60 cm hole.
When Mary, my science teacher, asked me what the problem was, I kind of smiled and pulled out the drilless auger. She was not happy. I apologized as I explained what happend. We finally decided we had to dig it up, after many attempts of trying to screw the pieces back together in the hole.
But wait, there's more.
All we had was a small gardening shovel to help us dig. My friend Alejandro began digging like a madman, hoping to find it at any second. Mary told us not to lose where it was exactly.
And that's what we did. We lost it's place. We dug too
far in the wrong direction, and by now it's looking something like what
you see in the picture to the left of the page.
We kept digging, hopelessly with this tiny little gardening shovel. We
thought we almost found it once, because I had hit something hard with
it. It was only a rock though, much to everyone's disappointment.
I kept digging until I saw some silver shining through the brown soil. I was overjoyed. We dug down enough so we could attach the missing piece to the rest of the auger. Two of us worked to carefully shake, pull, and twist the auger out. Mary was still up set, and she told me I had to do a web page about this awful mistake. So I did, and here it is.
I hope that through my utter stupidity, you may learn a lesson...and that is...
Don't play with augers!
Thank you for your time.
