The first earth-moving machine for the natural gas pipeline renovation arrived on site at seven o'clock on Monday morning.
The location was an abandoned industrial zone in Allegany County, Western Pennsylvania. This was the former site of a smelting plant, and the soil beneath the surface had been interwoven with various pipelines for decades.
The construction team's engineers spent two weeks resurveying the underground pipe network, marking out all the conflict points, before driving the first excavator in on Monday morning.
Ethan sent Leo a message that morning with an attached photo. It captured the exact moment the excavator's bucket bit into the dirt, framed against the early morning sky and a few construction lights that hadn't yet been turned off.
