Valentine's Day in Wardak Province

This past week Dani took a trip to Wardak province with several of USACE's customers. The helo was absolutely FREEZING! The weather in the morning was wonderful, but in the afternoon we "raced" back to Kabul to beat the snowy weather. It was neat to see the weather moving in so quickly from the air. . . and luckily we made it, or we would have spent the night at FOB Airborne without anything but our uniforms and body armor.


The sunrise is always beautiful from the airport. From left to right is Dani & 3 CSTC-A representatives, Bobby, Paul and CDR Hawn.


The views while freezing almost make it worth the torture! :-)


The group visit the "flag ship" project for the ANP program. It is the National Police Training Center (NPTC), and is a huge facility. In this photo you can just see the outline of several building foundations.

This is another view of the "Training Compound" within the NPTC. This portion of the facility is the furthest along.

Another view from the air of the Training Compound.

Dani and CDR Hawn are consulting with the Contractor on how to best proceed forward with wadi (basically a large, natural drainage ditch) remediation.

Here is an example of a trench constructed to divert natural drainage away from the NPTC facility. It also servers as a anti-vehicle ditch to prevent a car bomb from approaching the facility.

We got to see the local laborers making CMU (concrete masonry units)! This machine is fed "mortar" in the front end, and near where the operator sits there are molds that get compacted.

When you lift the mold, wha-la, you have CMU ready to cure. Apparently the cure temperature is anywhere above 5 degrees Celsius. It was still requiring the water for the "mortar" to be heated in large drums over open flame.

The Contractor also told us a neat story about this "uncommon" handtool. On a site as large as this, there are only 2, yes, I said 2, rebar tying machines! Apparently it's a very popular item - whoever doesn't have one of the two is tying rebar by hand.

This photo is a little difficult to see in the smaller size, but this is a circular saw that was immediately mounted upside down to perform as a table saw. Again, there is only one, yes 1, of these on the site.

The mountains leaving the NPTC are gorgeous with all the snow.

In some locations we were low enough in elevation to see the snow line, and the pronounced drainages.

Heading back to Kabul, this is the "suburbia."

Kabul International Airport was exciting to see - it meant we made it just ahead of the weather. We hadn't been on the ground 10 minutes before it started snowing fairly hard. So Kabul didn't get a white Christmas, but partially had a white Valentine's Day.