Landscaping Around Iraivan

It has been many years coming, but in the last few weeks we have finally begun to terraform the land right around the temple. All these years this area (see the red-dirt surrounding the temple in this photo) has been a storage and construction zone, with large trucks arriving to offload crates from India, giant cranes working to lift stones in place, all of which made it impossible to do much there. But wait! Now the wait is over and Dennis Wong is shaping the land. His primary goal is to make it even, so the abundant Kauai rain waters shed evenly away from the temple in all directions. Water is the mortal enemy of any building, and if we are to actually have a temple that lasts a thousand years, this water management plan is critical.

So Dennis (who has worked here for 40 years making the gardens and ponds) is out there morning to night in dozers, excavators, skidsteers, 12-ton compactors, cutting the earth to perfection. The slides tell the still-in-progress story.

Iraivan from above. The little yellow dot is a bull dozer.

Some major concrete footings needed to be removed with the backhoe.

They are heavy.

They were footings used to form up the original foundation back in 1998

Dennis stacks them up.

Good job, Dennis! If you ever want to hear a good Gurudeva story, just ask Dennis.

The bulldozer is the main tool for this task.

Shaping, leveling, carving the slopes.

Lots of dirt has to be removed.

We mean lots of dirt!

Here you can begin to see the way he is sloping the earth away from the temple.

It\

s slow work, cutting half an inch at a time. '

All of this loose soil will be moved and stored nearby.

Meanwhile, we need to break up the cement so it can be trucked away. Here Keith uses a diamond saw.

But it is not enough and Dennis brings in a big jackhammer.

That\

s the right tool.'

Hours and days of busting up the concrete.

Into a course rubble that others can deal with.

They will grind it small, into a gravel used for construction work. So it is recyclable.

Meanwhile another excavator works on our garden wood chips mountain!

Stay tuned as this landscaping evolves into something beautiful.

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