We hit a Buried Line -on the Last job of the season.

we hit an unmarked line and of course it's the last job of the season all right so this particular project here is it's a big giant window well um the old one that was in we took it out and it uh the base the base was not buried with dirt around it it just had this landscape rock down here that was uh towing it in so that you can see that the base boat in everything boat in and then upon excavating deeper i i put a spike in the ground and that thing just sunk so it's got riprap in the soils this is just typical like city backfill in saint paul where you get the the limestone that's back filled with garbage but um we're going to do a thickened base i talked to the engineer about it and he felt like a foot of rock should bridge this up just fine in here um it's gonna be beefier than the other one that other one was just sitting on some class five and not much of it so it was just uh yeah um that's what we got to do so i'm hoping this side over here isn't as wet as that side or nasty and we got a good base and we don't have to do [Music] we did hit an unmarked line today and what i'm going to do is walk through how we handle it inside of our company we have to do what's called a utility locate and call in public utilities know where we're going to be digging they come out and they mark all public utilities this is the way i understand it and they'll paint the lines and put flags in and that lets us know exactly where we can dig or can't take so if something happens and we hit a line and it's been clearly marked it's our fault it's our responsibility we pay the bill basically we hooked a random chunk to this pvc with the corner of the clam there and busted it there's some random unmarked wire running through here that we did not hit luckily it was just the pvc uh we need to clean it up a little bit so i'm gonna cut it back here and then i'm gonna cut it back here on the other side of the crease kind of dig out around it a little bit so we can get the sleeve on it i love my grease gun so when we hit an unmarked line like this one our standard operating procedure is a little different an unmarked line basically means that it's a private line the public utilities don't have to mark private lines they're not responsible for that this was a private unmarked line and so then we have to start to play sherlock holmes and figure out whose line it is now in this case we're going to put it back together and we track down that this is actually an irrigation line so then we called out the irrigation contractor responsible on the site to make sure that he was good with the way we repaired this now if this was a cable line or a private electrical line something that we're really not comfortable doing that's when we would call out a contractor to fix it so here's how i look at it if i've called in all my utility locates and they've clearly marked where all the lines are and i snagged that bugger that's on me to pay that bill but if a line is not marked and i hit that line then i've got some arguing rights and sometimes that happens where a line gets mismarked they've got to be within about three feet is the general rule that i've heard if they're more than three feet off from a line then the contractor may not be responsible for the repair of that line but if they've marked that line and they're within three feet of that line on either side of it and you hit that line that's on you you've got to be careful that's at least the way i understand it and these rules change is going to be different from different parts of the country today we got our dump truck driver on his way out his hand he's going to haul some junk on out of here for us make some more room and uh yes we're gonna need a lot of fill but now here's the flip side of the coin if we did not mark this job site and we anything we hit is now our responsibility if we didn't do a utility locate on this thing we failed to properly notify the companies we are 100 responsible for anything and everything we have that's why it's really important to follow those utility locate guidelines and to document the start of your project to make sure you know where all of the utilities are because where the responsibility lies can be one of those finger-pointing matches and this is i'm just sharing from experience what we've you know done over the past 25-30 years of digging in the dirt and finding goodies [Music] some people have said well you know why do you use this grapple for digging why do you use it for this you know it's one of those tools that it's maybe not perfect for digging but once you start to get familiar with it it's you're just like ah i don't really feel the bucket is better i know it's weird but it's like you just get so used to the grappling how to use it and how to dig this way and how to dig that way and how to do this and how to you know sprinkle and break clumps up and feather rocking with it where you're just like i kind of don't want to take it off even when maybe it's not the best tool for it that's why it pretty much went on and it's just stayed on even on dirt jobs we use versalock standard block for very specific reason it's solid all the way through and what we've got to do is we've got to actually pin it and we've got to line those four dots on the top to the slots in the block below it that's how you get that block to properly pin and when you line it all up it automatically sets it back now you've got a solid block and it's a mortarless system here's something i really want to cover with you guys this rock right here is the key and we always go heavy you're technically only supposed to need 12 inches of rock we like to put in a lot more rock it's cheap cheap insurance and this is what keeps these walls from experiencing hydrostatic blowout where the wall has too much water pressure can't go through and it's also the reason why we don't technically need drain tile we will put drain tile in because it makes customers happy because they smile and they see a drainage system but this rock makes the entire wall porous i've actually said if you ever see a drainage outlet on a retaining wall operating that wall's in a state of failure because the entire wall is supposed to just allow the water to just go through it it's a very porous system when it's all done properly together and you can see here how we over engineer this now this is actually soil we imported this is not the soil that we dug out we hauled that nasty stuff out this is fresh soil we brought in so the kitty cat right there she's wearing a winter i call them winter tracks uh it's an all season track but i call them winter tracks because it just dominates in wintertime and you guys we've got four epic snow plowing videos coming out i'm serious so excited so excited okay look at this block it drives me nuts i hate this block and i just don't like to see people use this see how sam's just throwing them in they're light this is why a lot of companies will choose this block and they'll use this block because they're so light it's easy to work with but they also don't make strong walls how do you connect these blocks together do you guys see a pin system there's no pin system in these blocks they have little tiny lips on the back of the block and that little limp is what is the only thing that holds them together and then you have to core fill the block but a lot of times guys don't core fill the block right they're cutting steps and that's why these walls tend to have problems when they really don't need to have problems hey real quick you guys not real quick i want to talk about like i still haven't got my element banner i don't know how long it's been but i still love the company i don't know if they want to be like a silent sponsor of the channel but they do sponsor and help me make videos like this so i can talk about you know what we what's happening on our job sites and how we build projects and some of the techniques we use and hopefully it helps you guys out power behind the element software to help a guy understand his business is why i i'm proud to partner with them wholeheartedly proud to partner with them and i have a podcast with them too landscape disruptors we got five more courses stacked and then we're back filled uh two from the top all the way around for the day we are just gonna keep building and backfilling so when we build these walls we can go we can dry stack up to two feet we can put yeah four blocks up and then flip the grid over and then place our rock in place and then backfill the compass and compact you know all the way up and then just dry stack and that way we can get a tighter sequencing on our jobs don't stand there if they have boom see once you start using the cmp grapple you just i i don't even know how i mean yes guys be like the tilt rotator can do this that and the other thing and yeah they can i just like this i prefer this i don't think this debuts gonna have this ever off from it i mean we'd have to be doing just stupidly big excavating job and then we just get a bigger excavator to do that yeah i don't think that's ever going to come off now that i think about it guys watch this in 4k and on a big screen and hey if you like videos like this could you hit that thumbs up button it goes a long long way and it's super appreciated and maybe leave a comment down below [Music] so next step is we're going to stack two more courses then it's going to be a grid layer and then we're going to stack the course on top of that and get that all back filled at chunk of pvc but we hit last week we got patched up it ended up it was a sprinkler main for the sprinkler system so we patched it the sprinkler guys came out just to make sure everything was all good so that's all good to go we're going to get packed up underneath it and then fill up over the top [Music] corner [Music] still but we're done with the build we need to excavate this out a little bit more we need about another foot to get the grid to lay flat and now we're just going to focus on backfilling all this today and then i'm going to glue the caps tomorrow because it's going to be like 20 degrees warmer and uh yeah that's where we're at we gotta regrade here we're gonna put a little bit of a slope on it to get the water going away from the building uh we have to finish kind of backfilling and grading this area out to get the water running away towards the parking lot see no gaps on that top cap so here's what we got if you guys will remember this window well was absolutely failing the the sides were all tipping in and we dug down deeper than we would normally excavate for the base we went extra on the rock and we did a geo grid bridge everything graded away from the building management companies still kind of trying to figure out what they want to do with this it sounds like we will be back doing putting in some edging and some more rocks and then we'll take a look at how this turned out yeah last one of the season it went real well then i'm gonna clean the dust off the sides there i just haven't gotten a chance to so sam mentioned something that maybe you guys didn't catch but he said geogrid bridge and what a geogrid bridge is is normally we'll put six inches of rocking under a normal wall with good soil conditions if we have to deepen it we could go up to a foot but if we're still worried about the soil that's underneath it we'll actually put a layer of geo grid in it or multiple layers of geogrid right in that base material and that'll help lock everything together so we'll have six inches of rock a layer of geo grid then another six inches of rock and then on top of that we can put our base in and we've done two foot geogrid bridges on the wall where i said you know how we lost like fourteen thousand five hundred dollars on a project we actually had an eight foot geo grid bridge in there that was some of the footage that we never were it was able to recover eight feet that was a pretty mess and it was that we lost time on that just trying to figure out where do we stop how far out do we go the calculations of how deep do we have to go to to support the weight because on that other wall we had a corner and we had a lot of the weight coming down and so then we had to calculate the weight of that corner to spread it out that's why we had to go so deep we couldn't do it with a standard base and all that took time and while that's taking time i we have to also slow the cruise down because are we going to be at pulling wall out that we've already built because we went too far forward and didn't get the proper calculation underneath the base of how wide deep and long the trench would go for the sub base material so those are all the things that kind of hurt us on that job site and um so if you missed it i just wanted to answer a couple of those questions coming down the pipeline is sam and i went up north chasing snow we did swear to goodness went up north chasing snow because frankie's up there working on a project and calls us hey i got two three inches of snow coming down and i'm like sam we had we had green grass and it wasn't pretty in minnesota let's go find let's go chase this stone i don't have a single account up there but i do have you know of a minimal maintenance country gravel road that never gets plowed or taken care of the only time we can ever get a even a road grader to come back there is when we go to the town board and complain enough so i was hoping that there would be some snow on this thing we just went up chasing snow and having fun and we get up there we get all the cameras set up we get the got a 32 year old four-wheeler we got that fired up we're gonna chase each other it's gonna be amazing footage call my wife calls up hey uh looks like we're supposed to get eight to nine inches of snow uh back here in the city what we're a hundred miles away it's not the end of the world but it's like what where did this come from it's just like this weirdest snowstorm coming so of course then the old typical scenario you take the plow off your truck it snows the next day you take that weird weekend getaway with your significant other and the snow's that night makes it fun and that's all we got for you today i hope you enjoyed this video and my ramblings after this video god bless you guys and go get em make it an awesome one