We finished our work at the river transect. Now we had one more sample to collect. It was to the north, where the abandoned valley is still flooded at the site of the tube well that started this idea. It is well BNGB013, along one of the transects that was done for the BanglaPIRE project. It was done along the side of a major “highway,” so will be accessible and not far out of our way home. Alamgir had a contact in a nearby village and arranged, and rearranged a driller. We were glad to be heading back
to Dhaka. The hotel we stayed in was the best in Brahmanbaria, but it had bedbugs. In this moderate sized town, the choice of restaurants was limited.
The drillers arrived at our meeting place late. There was a fight between two villages the night before, and some people were stabbed. They own a plot of land along the main road in the other village. Those villagers wanted them to swap it for land perpendicular to the road, but they refused. The land along the road is valuable for shops. The result was a fight until the police broke it up, but several people ended up injured. They came without their equipment so
they could sneak quickly through the other town. They got what they needed at the store where we met, about 2 km west of the well site. I went ahead and located the exact place we wanted to sample.
Since the well had already been logged and sampled, we only needed to drill down to the sands, making sure the stratigraphy agreed. Relooking at the logs of the well, I realized that we barely had enough extension rods to make it to the sampling depth. Luckily we hit the sands with a couple of feet to spare. We
got our sample and headed for Dhaka. Of course, we hit terrible traffic and were late to dinner with other scientists from our project that just arrived from the U.S. Over dinner I learned that Kazi Matin Ahmed, one of the Dhaka University professors we work with, was from a town right near our sampling. He said that growing up he would go to school by boat during the monsoon. The next day was packing up at the university and making copies of everything. We also had to pack up a number of GPS and seismic recorders that need to be returned to the U.S. for repairs. Unsalvageable was one from Madhupur that was destroyed in a fire. This trip was very successful; we achieved all our goals, although as usual, there were a lot of changes of plans on the fly. In Bangladesh, nothing goes as planned, but we always get everything
done. Bangladesh is a country of resilient people who know how to get things done.
