Pick up your trash folks

Osmany cutting a steel cable
 We're putting some steps into the hillside at the new house. I just wanted some steps, but Osmany is not satisfied with half way measures, so he's building a stairway. He's down to the last few steps and he finds a couple of old steel pipes in the way. What are they? Gas lines? Water lines? Buried electrical conduit? They are only buried under about six inches of dirt, but we are good 20-25 feet from the top of the hill. Somebody could have run some pipes through here for some tom fool reason. If doesn't seem likely that they are being used, but I call the gas company anyway. They sent a man out and he dutifully climbed around the house to get to our mystery. Took him less than a minute to tell us that they weren't gas lines. We'd had 30 minutes to chew on it and decided it probably wasn't water or electric either, so we elected to cut it.

Osmany started with an angle grinder with a four inch diameter cutting wheel, but it was kind of slow going. Seems the pipe was full of wires. So I drug out my 40 year old Black & Decker Saw Cat and a seven inch cut off disk. It made short work of the pipes. Just before Osmany finished the last cut I thought to record the event so that's what you see above: Osmany finishing the last cut.

Turns out they weren't pipes at all but rather big, fat steel cables. I can only surmise that they were used for some heavy construction project here many years ago and then abandoned. Could have been from when the pilings for the house were put in, which was 40 years ago, or it may have been from when they built the street and installed the sewer, which would have been even before that. And now we've dug them up.