It will take a lot more than a succession of a few hot, sunny days with no rain to dry out the forest. Yesterday was such a hot, sunny day as we ventured out for our daily ravine walk. Unlike the day before, we assured ourselves that this time we would avoid going to the area commonly part of our circuit that had us treading very, very carefully on the deep, slimy muck that had replaced the security of a well-travelled forest trail system.

As we neared the end of our circuit yesterday drawing us closer to the area of the hillside collapses located behind the street we live on, the loud, piercing, screeching sound of heavy machinery cutting through thick metal alerted us to the fact that we would soon come upon the work crews using two massive building cranes; one with a pile-driver, to deeply insert into the clay-comprised forest floor the industrial metal stakes to bedrock that the engineering firm engaged by the municipality had determined would save the hillsides from further collapse.

That collapse occurring anywhere else in the forested area that comprises the ravine would be of relatively little interest both to the municipality and to the few people who regularly access the ravine for recreational purposes. However, since the collapse occurred on a promontory behind which the street we live on was carved out of the area decades earlier, it is of immense concern.

The three houses that were evacuated remain unoccupied, a large steel fence surrounding them. Their neighbours on either side of the street, south and north, have been living under a state of some apprehension that they too might be required to evacuate their homes, some of them on the verge of being in the same situation as the emptied houses.

The security company that was hired to ensure that no one trespassed into the area of the three quarantined houses other than authorized construction personnel, has had a vehicle with at least one occupant stationed before the houses for the past three months.

As we left the green embrace of the untouched forest -- which represents the greater balance of a wide swath of territory -- we came to the part of the landscape that bears little resemblance to its original presentation; gone the trees, the slopes were bulldozed to a more gradual degree, part of the hillsides covered with large rocks and the creek below temporarily re-directed to enable construction crews to get on with their work.

The work of pile-driving those steel posts has been going on for a week. For the last several days, work has continued into the night-time hours; last night it was ten o-clock before work stopped, after having begun at seven in the morning. The closer the work reaches from its start at a major thoroughfare at the foot of the street to where we live across from the ravine, the more we hear and feel; tremors caused by the forced insertion of those huge rods.