We hope all of you who celebrate Christmas had a lovely day yesterday– well, actually we hope everyone had a lovely day yesterday. We are currently in our hometown hunkering down and watching a blizzard develop.

A week or so ago, we promised you a semi-positive tale, which in the spirit of Christmas it seems appropriate to share with you now:

As we’ve mentioned before, from what we’re hearing, our parcel appears to be about the only property along the Line 6B route where any construction activity at all is taking place. In fact, our property has been a staging area for a lot of pipe that’s going into the ground on adjacent properties (nobody ever told us about this beforehand, even though it’s a fact that might well have affected our negotiations). Here’s what our backyard has looked like the past couple of weeks:

Last week and the week before, construction crews were busy at work on our property. They bored a hole and pulled some 500 feet of pipe underneath the road just to our east. We confess that it’s a pretty fascinating process and we kind of enjoyed learning about it from talking with and watching the construction crews at work. (We’ll post a slideshow of the process later today.)

At any rate, it was a good thing we were watching and talking with the construction crews: a week ago last Saturday, when it looked like they were about to begin pulling the pipe, we went out and asked when they would get started (because we wanted to capture some video). We were told that they probably wouldn’t start until “tomorrow.” It took a minute, but we quickly realized that “tomorrow” happened to be Sunday. And according the construction line list agreement we made with Enbridge, there would be no construction work on our property on Sundays (except in emergencies). So we called our ROW agent. He answered, seemed surprised, said he’d look into it and call us back. In an hour or so, he did call back and assured us the crews had been notified that they cannot work on Sundays; they’d re-commence Monday morning.

Now, this may not be quite the sort of responsiveness that you get if you’re a fancy doctor all decked out in hunting gear, but our ROW agent was plenty responsive. And we’re grateful for it. In fact, it’s only fair to say that in general, our ROW agent has been (from what we’ve heard) much better than most when it comes to attending to landowner concerns during construction.

Of course, if this moderately positive story (we don’t want to go overboard with praise; after all, we’re really just talking about somebody doing his job) was Enbridge’s Christmas gift to us, we also have to note that it was wrapped up in some pretty crappy paper. For one thing, if we hadn’t been out there talking to construction crews ahead of time, we never would have known of their plans to work on Sunday. Chances are they would have worked on Sunday.

And then, a few days later, there was this little episode: we happened to notice the back-hoe operator digging a big hole on our property and taking bucketsful of dirt over to the neighbor’s property. Here it is:

We’ve noted before that construction crews are a bit too cavalier (in our view) about moving dirt and soil from one property to another. So we watched. What we saw was not just that they were taking subsoil from our property over to the neighbor’s; they were returning with bucketsful of stinky muddy sludge from the neighbor’s and dumping it into the hole on our property. This one, we took care of ourselves.

Again in fairness, the construction foreman was very nice (as almost all of the construction workers have been), responsive, and apologetic; he acknowledged that the backhoe operator shouldn’t have been dumping the sludge onto our property and put a stop to it.

But in both of these instances, what if we hadn’t been home? What if we hadn’t been watching? What if we hadn’t been vigilant? It makes us wonder what happens on our property when we’re not there? It makes us wonder what happens on your property.