We find Buried problems

we ran into some unforeseen things on this job the customer didn't know about it we had some inklings in the beginning but we didn't know how bad it was going to get until we started cracking the ground open we originally hired just to rebuild the retaining wall a couple wing walls on each side of it and then when we were doing our initial investigation into the site we looked at the deck footings and they were jacked up and out of the ground by six inches eight inches in places and the whole deck was kitty wampus then that should have been our first saying uh first sign that something bad was happening [Music] so these are still the old dirt tracks on this skid loader and after this video was shot we actually switched over to the snow tracks and one of the questions guys have asked me is well don't snow tracks work good in dirt and they do they're actually phenomenal i think they're better in dirt than they are um yeah they're just phenomenal in dirt let's just put it that way the reason we switch them back and forth is we do a lot of demolition and when you're doing a lot of demolition you can run over concrete or rebar or chunks of stuff that you really shouldn't be running over and create big gouges and tears in it and we just want to save the tracks this is kind of cool so this is how we load our excavators i'm sure a lot of guys do it but here you can actually see what we're doing is extending the boom out that way we don't get a teeter-totter effect with the excavator nate just gently lowers it right down onto the trailer don't slam nothing don't jar the operator nothing like that just the daewoo is actually off to another retaining wall project that we're working on that you're going to see that has worse water than the one you're gonna see today but it's not the end of the world it just means we gotta fix it so we're building uh we originally hired to build a terraced retaining wall and so you can see where tim's got the bottom wall in and then they're just digging out for the top wall i mean it's one of the things that zach was measuring there was to make sure that we keep the proper distance one of the things that guys tend to cheat on terraced retaining walls is instead of going through the process of getting engineering they put terrace retaining walls too close together now the rule is for the top retaining wall not to put a surcharge on the bottom retaining wall you have to take the height of the bottom retaining wall so if it's four foot and double it for the spacing between the terraces or have eight foot of terrace and that way you don't have any surcharge going from one wall onto the other wall and when you squeeze them terraces too close together you're actually putting more weight on the bottom terrace than you were if you just made it all one wall it's actually a worse scenario by snugging two walls too close together without compensating for it and that's one of the things that you see a lot of guys doing to get away from going and buying a permit going and having the expense of getting an engineer to sign off on it but ultimately it's probably the worst possible thing you can do and you guys see that snow coming down that's gonna have a pretty big impact on us on another video now we're on the other side of the house kind of same spot as the upper wall over here and we need another step down so that's what we're going to start working on right now and it's snowing and it's snowing and it's what is it the 20th today of october yeah yeah so a little uh a little bit weird weather for this time of year but it's been one of those years so hard to schedule anything rainy wet hot we did get some nice dry weather here uh what about a couple weeks ago yeah we had good conditions for the other side finishing up the boulder wall was great that it turned out to dry out for us and then it was the dirt was actually really dry for a while there yeah i can't believe that grass is already growing in there yeah so what tim is doing right here is he's actually basing a step down and the reason he's got two blocks on top of each other is because he's actually going the grade goes drops down and so we've got to keep the right amount buried and so that's how we create a step down is then we fill up that gap with the rock and then we can bridge over that but enough block stays buried this is what we're finding look behind alex right now look at the deck footings you see how far up those are above the patio those deck puddings were originally set at patio height you can actually see it right behind alex that putting set of patio height and all the ones alongside of them popped out of the ground that's because this water in this trench it freezes and then it thaws and it freezes and thaws but what happens is when it freezes it expands when it thaws it doesn't contract because once it expands as that frost is moving out of the ground the fines from the soil fill it in and continually raise everything up and so what we're going to do is we're going to actually put in dre a drain tile system to mitigate this water because the water in this case you can see is not very far below the ground water table i mean uh around not very far not very deep down [Music] but luckily we've actually got a pond just behind us and we're gonna dig an outlet all the way to the pond [Music] well this house was having some water issues we were just digging to hook up our drain towel and there's just uh lots of trapped water in this thing this might not be trapped it's making its way down here down to this uh runoff area but there was a lot more water trapped in the house than i thought there was got her a little makeshift silt sock down here but yeah she's gushing out of there pretty good just what you want in november all right so i'm gonna get that bad boy fired up i'm gonna re-cut some of these caps get them re-glued dialed in where they need to be and then i'm gonna go help tim fill in that long run a drain towel going back to the pond uh while the other two are over there starting to backfill that wall and then once we get that done we're all gonna come over here get this back filled and uh clean up and get on out of here so that tim and i can be out on our site am i in blaine's site tomorrow because it sounds like he's going to be out for the rest of the week so what sam was actually talking about was blaine ended up hurting his back and so they're in the middle of a a much nastier site than what tim has got going on here and so we're trying to get through this one real fast so that we can put all our resources all our manpower and guys out on that site those wing walls look really nice this other side wasn't as wet as the other side was so this is if you're looking up here on the back side of the property this is the left side and the other side was the right side tim's on the right side right now and you can see how bad this is measure once right so how the saying goes yeah measure once cut twice down the center of that one so that's probably it right there huh yeah it looks about one of the things to point out to you guys is the fact that you'll see that part of the trench is wrapped in fabric and we finished digging and part of it [Applause] there's water still moving through it so there must have been a lot of trapped water in this foundation the old drain tile system wasn't doing anything so how many years was it not going anywhere you know yeah so the reason i want to point out that some of this actually has filtered fabric wrap is that's all a permeable system it's going to be filled with rock and it becomes a front and active french drain but at some point we just want to get that water to flow and go so where we know we're not worried about building a french drain we then convert to a hard pipe and extend it all the way out [Music] so this is the area where we've switched from a french drain to just a hard pipe we're at that point we're just trying to get the water to go right down to the pond as fast as we possibly can we're not worried about sucking up any of the ground water from that area because it's not jeopardizing anything and it's got it's close enough to the pond that if it's gonna flow it's gonna go [Music] so the boys have some light grading to do and we had a little bit of extra stuff that we had on these unexpected surprises kind of delayed us on this project but we were able to get through it and able to get this dried up and so the boys are now all working out on one site that we're hopefully going to be able to bang out real quick and show you the video on that it's literally the worst project of the year um and i think i may even title the video that simply because we were on another retaining wall started to dig it out and this same scenario happened except for the water has no outlet and the water is literally streaming through it now on this site tim keeps calling it trapped water which i think another technical term might be called perched water depending on what part of the world you're from right um but there's also i think a possibility that that could be a potential spring down there looking at how much water was flowing and how fast it was flowing it may not be trapped it may be continual and that's our video for today i hope you enjoyed it uh make sure you guys stick around if you don't mind because we got a lot more cool stuff coming down the pipeline and we'll hopefully connect with you on another one god bless go get em you guys and we'll see you next time