If you see one of these out your condo window in Da Nang, start looking for a new place to live

Da Nang is a wonderful place and I enjoy living here for the most part although there are certain things about it that are beyond my control that if I could change them I would.

One of the main problems with Da Nang is that it is experiencing an incredibly rapid expansion and no matter where you go in the city it seems there is construction everywhere. At the moment in my neighborhood there are at least 5 builds going on and thankfully I live on a high enough floor and have good enough windows that for most of the day I don't even realize it is going on until a truck shows up and the workers feel compelled to throw everything off of it in as loud a manner as possible.

There has been a vacant plot of land just opposite my condo for quite some time though and two days ago a very strange piece of equipment showed up on it with two guys working on it all day long.

I have a bit of background in construction but nothing large scale. My exposure to it is in building small-scale cement things such as retaining wall that me and my father built when we didn't really know what we were doing so we overkilled it and probably used about 3x the amount of cement necessary. We joke that if a nuclear bomb does drop in that location, our retaining wall will be the only thing left in the city.

With large scale productions such as what this may unfortunately become, the builders want to be a bit more efficient with their use of building materials.

I asked a few friends of mine what they are doing because to me it seemed akin to people drilling for oil which of course we wouldn't be doing here in Da Nang. Well my friend took one look at it and told me it is a "penetrometer." What is a penetrometer? Well, in laymen's terms it is an indication that your neighborhood is about to become very noisy, for a very long period of time.

You see these machines are used to slowly push steel beams into the ground that measure various things in the soil but the end result being what the composition is like and what sort of things they can wedge down in there, including cement, in order to put something very large on top of it. According to my friend this is normally only used to determine the capabilities of the soil if you are going to build something very large, like 8 -15 floors tall or more. When you make something that tall, it has to be determined what the soil is capable of bearing above it. If this wasn't done we would just have buildings collapsing left and right all over the place.

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There's lots of different kinds of these things and they go from a few feet to a few meters, to much further than that. This one across the street, I watched them for a while, had a long series of detachable bits that they kept adding and they were going VERY far into the ground.

This is very bad news for those of us in my building and we have only two potential saving graces.

• The results could come back stating that it isn't possible to put something very large on this pieces of land but that is unlikely considering that my building that is across the street from it is 11 stories tall and just down the road there is a 9 and 15 story building. The soil is probably sound or can be modified to accommodate either of these sizes.

• There is an extremely wealthy land-owner on the property just behind where this penetrometer was parked the other day. They are old money or something and kind of dictate to some degree what is allowed to happen around here. There have been multiple bars and other such things that were shut down for being consistently too loud. Nobody parks in front of his gated entrances and he has guard booths that are manned at two different entrances. There isn't really much reason to live here since this has been turned into a tourist nightmare of sorts but hey, maybe he is a hard ass and is just holding out for the hell of it. Since nobody is out there manning the penetrometer today, that call may have already been made.

Either way though, the fact that they were out there so much as looking at the possibility of making a big build here is enough to get me worried. I have already started putting out feelers to see what else is available but honestly, I don't even know if that is worthwhile because unless you move really far out into the countryside, there is a very good chance that there is either construction there now, or will be soon.

A penetrometer though, according to my friend in the know, is used when they want to do something really big... something that could take more than a year to complete. If people come by and start digging out a bunch of earth for the basement and support beams, I will know that it is official and need to make a segue to another place to call home.