Bozzlife: The Joys of Homeownership!
Last week I wrote this post asking you to come up with some theories on what might be going on in two pictures that I shared.
The stories that some of you came up with were pretty fantastic. There were also a couple that were very close to reality. Today, I am going to share the full story on one of those pictures with you.
A couple weeks ago now, the area I live in was inundated with over five inches of rain across a day and a half period. This rain triggers a series of events with lead to a once in five hundred years flooding event. This included the failure and breaching of several dams along a specific river.
Though our road and back yard was flooded, our house was spared (this time). Shortly after the water started to recede, I noticed a small hole in our front yard along side our driveway. You can see it indicated in the picture above by the white arrow.
Every time our sump pump would run, water would come out of the hole and run down the driveway/yard and into the road.
Thinking there was simply an issue with our sump line, I contacted my friend and he brought his crew over to start digging up the area to see if they could find the leak.
After a significant amount of digging, they discovered that the leak appeared to be coming from underneath the concrete driveway. This meant they would have to cut out a section and see if they could locate the break at a later date.
They setup a secondary sump pump to move the water to the road so it wouldn't continue to erode the area under the driveway.
After the Memorial Day weekend, they came back out with the Bobcat to see if they could get to the pipe. They tore out a couple sections of concrete and then started to dig down. Unfortunately, the break was much deeper than they had believed, so my buddy had to go rent an excavator to dig the hole out properly. If you look really close at the picture above, you can see the white PVC pipe and the crack along it.
The break ended up being about six or seven feet deep and this is what I came home to after my doctors appointment on that Tuesday.
With an excavator secured, he started to dig out the hole more so they could access the pipe to fix it. You can see his Bobcat (orange and white) in the background of this picture.
This is another picture of the crack along the pipe after the used the excavator to clear more of the dirt away.
And here is a picture after they cut away one of the broken sections. You can see that the pipe looks more oval than round. They think it was probably crushed a long time ago and it could have been cracked for a while. It was just the high volume of water going through it that made it recently start causing issues.
A neighbor who has been living in this area much longer than we have stopped by and told us that this tile runs the length of the road and everyone's sump pump feeds into it before it dumps into the storm drain.
Even though everyone feeds into it since the break was on our property, we are responsible for the cost of repairs.
It was a fairly quick repair for them and by the time I had finished eating my lunch they already had the patch in place and they were filling in the hole with gravel.
The gravel will protect the pipe from future damage and it will also allow proper drainage for any ground water so it doesn't damage or erode the soil under the driveway.
This is what we were left with by the time they finished up. Like I said, it only took them about six or seven hours to do the full job. It is amazing how quickly you can do a job when you have the proper tools.
We have someone coming this week to start working on the concrete. They are going to replace the section that my friend had to remove and they are also going to make our driveway wider to give us more clearance for our travel trailer when we bring it home.
That will probably be another post!
It could have been an easier fix, but it also could have been much worse so we are thankful for that. We are also very thankful that we have good friends who have the skills to help us out when we are in jams like this!
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