Swamp defeated
Continuous June rains disrupted all plans. The swamp swelled, as in the spring flood, flooded the entire forest. Drainage pipes under the bed of the road under construction did not have time to let the water flow. The kilometer of the last section of the new road that adjoins the 121st kilometer of Dmitrovskoye Highway, was blocked by the widest river, it stretched along the high‑voltage line. Survey work on the transition of the last section of the swamp stopped. On the 121st kilometer from Dubna, it was possible to cross only by boat or go around fourteen kilometers across the Great Volga.
The surveyor Vladislav Kalachev was at the facilities from early morning until late at night. In the morning, he led with theodolite the breakdown of the park near the hotel under construction, at lunchtime, he was already seen by all five brigades of concrete workers and asphalt workers, handymen on the road. He gave them elevations, checked whether their work had been done exactly, whether the roadbed was horizontal, whether the slopes were correct.
In the evenings, in the five‑minute management, the foreman Nikita Nikitovich Rozhkov, the construction manager Alexander Ivanovich Rodinkov asked him the same question, "When will we prepare the canvas at the high‑voltage?"
When? It was very difficult to answer. It rained continuously. Once, Vladislav made an attempt to climb into the swamp along the sketched boards, to look for a solid point to set the level. Nothing came of it, after ten steps the legs fell through and Vadim plunged headlong into the swamp slurry. His assistant rack Lenya Kotlyar threw him a rope and helped him to get out on land.
They sat by the fire, dried clothes. Mosquitoes mercilessly burned the body, acrid smoke did not scare them away.
How to set a solid point in the middle of a high‑voltage strip? You can't lean on rotten stumps. Yes! You can't think of it right away.
On the first fine day, the foreman Rozhkov came to the aid of Kalachev. Two bulldozers pushed huge reinforced concrete pipes of a meter diameter into the swamp that should then pass flood water under the roadbed, with cables pulled them into the middle of the swamp.
Now, the review was magnificent. As much as two kilometers in the palm of your hand. The pipes sticking out a little from under the water were already quite a solid support which it was possible to break with and level the route of the future drainage ditch.
Prospectors are in a hurry. They started work immediately.
Kalachev sets the layer of the level, Kotlyar in high rubber boots deploys a four‑meter rail.
“Done, Lenya?”
“Yes.”
Kotlyar throws a raft into the water, similar to a ski and slowly, drowning in slurry, wanders to a high‑voltage support, there is the first high‑rise mark, a reaper, which the entire track will go from.
In the eyepiece of the level, Vladislav, like binoculars, sees Leonid walking... That's the backstop. The rail froze vertically. We must take a mark. The middle line counts a height of 246 centimeters. The first digit goes to the magazine.
“Come on!” Kalachev Leonid shouts. And he begins to break through along the high‑voltage. Ahead are two kilometers of research, two kilometers of a flat line of the future ditch that will be marked with the veshki by Kalachev, Kotlyar and the carpenter Nikolay Lukashchuk.
They worked for two days. The day began at dawn and ended in the dark. They sat one night, made calculations, drew profiles, drew up a project and in the morning, all the material lay on the table of the construction manager Rodinkov. The link of the excavator Boris Baryshev was summoned to the council.
They did not confer for long. Everything was clear to everyone. It is necessary to lower the water from the swamp into the Sestra River, so that later, by excavator and bulldozers to remove the peat layer to a solid base, which the foundation of the road will lie on. To do it, Boris Baryshev, Nikolay Gorbachev and Igor Myasnikov with a quarter‑cube excavator must dig a two‑kilometer trench along a high‑voltage line, starting from Kozlakov (from the lowest point).
The deadlines were tight. The Komsomol-youth brigades of the concrete workers Vasily Demedyuk, coming from Dubna and Leonid Aksenov, going from the 121st kilometer were already going out towards each other, they were separated by this ill‑fated water barrier.
Changed into wide swamp tracks, the excavator literally sailed through the swamp. Two kilometers went almost a day. At dawn, Baryshev saw Vladislav Kalachev. He stood on the escarpment and pointed his hand to the ground.
“We go to the starting point,” Nikolay Gorbachev guessed.
The passage to the river was struck quickly. At lunchtime, they entered the swamp. The water was drained by a waterfall into an open trench and ran to the river. Peat, mixed with fatty loam, stuck to the shovel, had to be knocked down with a crowbar almost every cycle. The further the excavators went into the swamp, the more the flow of water interfered. He destroyed the walls of an open trench, threatened to wash off the excavator, to overturn it. Kopka had to throw and make protective lintels.
And yet, in the shift of Igor Myasnikov, the water washed the wall of the trench under the excavator. The right caterpillar began to settle quickly... The car was overturning. The driver slowly took the levers on himself, the arrow from the right position quietly went to the left... subsidence began to stop. In the full left position of the boom, the excavator froze. Butchers carefully, as if afraid to wake someone up, got out of the car, took an ax and falling in a quagmire, went to cut trees. When the wall was almost fortified with birch stumps, Boris came. The excavator got out safely and again it seemed to be an arrow broken in half, rushing from right to left, from left to right. The bucket bit into the ground and a flat trench went into the distance for more than a kilometer.
The water level in the swamp was noticeably falling. On the sixth day, ten hours ahead of schedule, having taken out about five thousand cubic meters of soil, the excavators went to the very pipes from which Kalachev, Kotlyar and Lukashchuk led the route. Only the pipes were quite dry, their huge hollow cylinders gaping with black round holes. Vladislav stood on them with the same level in boots and commanded the racks. He already had another job. On a drained swamp under a high‑voltage line, there was a high‑rise breakdown of the road bed. Bulldozers approached from the 121st kilometer. Our friends, the excavators Boris Baryshev, Nikolay Gorbachev and Igor Myasnikov were also ready. They prepared a delicious fish soup from squints caught almost with their hands and rushed Kalachev.
“The fish soup is getting cold, Vladik!”
The final stage of work has started at the junction of the new road.
Yury TUMANOV