From the SCTA Facebook page;
El Mirage Update from Werner Schwarz:
SCTA Fissure Filling Friday, Fact Finding
Stress Cracks at El Mirage Dry Lake
To All,
I wanted to share yesterday experience I had at El Mirage, so we are on the same playing field. I’ve attempted to share facts as I saw them, and keep my opinions to a minimum.
I arrived at 8AM at George Callaway’s El Mirage ranch to help with a project the Callaway Racing Group has been working on. Bill Lattin and Scott Mattern were there as well. This was no official work party, just Bill, Scott, myself and others trying to gather facts on the amount of fissures (stress cracks) that have developed on the lake bed, and seeing for ourselves on how two different filling methods actually work.
George Callaway, Monte Warnock, and Pete Prentice have been working on a piece of equipment for a while that they hope will contribute to solving our fissure problem at El Mirage. With the help of Ed Fenn’s skip loader, we set out on the lakebed to do a trial run on filling the numerous fissures. After about three hours of tuning and tinkering, the bottom line is it does work. The Group is going to work on further refinements to speed up the process as they go. When everything is working, it roughly fills about a foot a minute. A wild ass guess of the amount of fissure length to fill is well over a mile of twists and tributaries.
The Friends Of El Mirage also had their crew there working away. They have a full-size skip loader, 20-foot flatbed heavy duty trailer, and a 4000 gallon water truck. The four of them have a method in place that they know well, after watching and helping them for an hour. They gather screened and separated dirt from an area 1000 feet north of the lakebed. They have a screener/separator piece of heavy equipment set up there. Stored there are about 8 large piles of screened dirt piled up ready to be transported out to the lakebed on their flatbed trailer to fill fissures. Shoveling from the trailer by hand, they mix that screened dirt with lots of water to make a slurry, then agitate by hand and go over it with a yard rack to make it smooth. They told me they average about 300 feet a day (looks closer to 200 to me).
Bottom line on both methods; the Friends are making slow but steady progress, Callaway Racing Group’s method does work, but is even slower (and yes, they are working to speed it up).
· The BLM will not allow any heavy equipment on the lakebed during weekends
· The Friends are working every weekday, 6AM to 2PM, when lakebed is open
· The Friends operation costs the SCTA nothing, it’s 100% funded by grant monies
· As announced at the last two Board meetings, The Friends accept any help they can get, and were appreciative that several of us were helping them (thank you to the crew of #218 roadster for helping them!!)
· The SCTA is pursuing other methods of faster/better fissure filling. Bill is currently negotiating with the BLM on these other methods. There is no guarantee that they will grant permission to use them.
· If you want to repair the lakebed to go racing, the best option right now is to support the Friends efforts and get volunteers out there during the weekdays to help. We need to do this no matter the outcome of the negotiations with the BLM. There is no shortage of ideas of how best to get this done. But the Friends are filling stress cracks every week day right now, and until something better is worked out, we need to be helping them.
· We will keep you informed of any news with the BLM
· Each SCTA Club should coordinate its effort so that we don’t have 100 people show up on a Friday, overwhelming the four guys who are working. Get in touch with you Club and then myself so efforts can be coordinated. If you do go out and work, please send me a short note about your activities
Thanks,
Werner Schwarz
SCTA Secretary
