Is that a blimp? and other tales from driving the lines

Heading south from Elizabeth City, down past the Coast Guard base and around the airport, we wound past fields and fancy waterfront houses until a bunch of blimps appeared on the right, parked next to what must have been a blimp hangar. We had to stop on the side of the road for a photo­­­­­–the sheer ridiculousness of these giant marshmallow-like things just sitting on the ground was too good of an opportunity to pass up. I guess they have to park them somewhere when they’re not circling above football games decked out with Goodyear banners, but the blimp field was definitely one of the more surprising things we saw as we drove along Line 1 last Sunday morning.

Photo courtesy of Dan Lizarralde

Dan and I drove Line 2 on Friday and Saturday, and most of Line 1 on Sunday, as a final sanity check on the drive tracks and station locations for deployment. There’s only so much that can be done by going over routes in Google Earth, and the best way to make sure that dirt tracks exist and are drivable, and that stations aren’t set to be deployed on private property decked out with ‘No Trespassing’ signs, is to drive the lines in advance.

Driving the lines takes a lot of time, but it’s a pretty straightforward operation–until you’re trying to find a turn onto a track that doesn’t actually exist, or a swarm of horseflies dive-bombs the car right when you have to get out to open a locked gate, or you venture past a posted warning to ask if you can set out instruments and a guy on a tractor politely warns you that there’s a biohazard risk if you go near his barns full of turkeys.

Aside from incidents like those, though, which were few and far between, both lines checked out alright. Corrected drive tracks have been loaded into GPS units along with waypoints for the station locations; everything is ready for the deployment teams to flag, and then deploy, some 700 stations along Line 2 starting tomorrow (Saturday). Many of the teams will have long drives along the line, with detours around swamps and rivers, but most of it’s along quiet roads past pleasant scenery, and when we do Line 1, one lucky team out past Elizabeth City will be treated to a close-up view of a bunch of blimps on the side of the road. I wonder what blimp-related noise would look like on a seismogram…if we see any strange signals on those few stations at least we’ll know what they came from.

(by Hannah Mark)