DM and the Knot Hole

Back when I was a wee gaffer, I grew up in a farming community that was fifty years behind the times and proud of that. Very few had electricity, or phone. Indoor plumbing was a path to the outhouse. Water came in buckets, was heated on a wood stove. Baths happened one per week. Schools were one and two rooms. I was the first year of busing, picked up on the public road, and dropped at school, when the roads were open, and the mud was not too deep. I did not get the privilege of walking to school up hill both ways.

Most Sundays the extended family attended church, if the road were clear, the truck running, and passable. When it got real cold, the truck did not run. Sometimes it could be started by pulling with the horses, or if a tractor had been started, the tractor. If that did not work, It was too cold anyway.

Winter stating of tractors required a pail of boiling water/antifreeze mix. With pure water, it would ice up inside the block, and that was not good. There was not enough anti freeze it it to leave it in the engine, just enough to stop the icing. After the tractor was put away, the anti freeze drained and hauled back to the house for reuse the next time the tractor was needed, usually for grain hauling, or grinding. The horses worked fine for manure hauling all winter.

Anyway, now that you know we were poor foke, who on Sundays went to a church in a small place, in the Hamlet, in a church that had been built by farmer volunteers, one of which had been a carpenter/steam engineer/farm building assembler as a young man, and another a bricklayer/mason, and another a oxen driver/oxen freighter/black smith- when the west was young, and many youths who need to learn what ever there was going.  It had a few issues here and there. The pews were made from dressed 1 inch pine. There were a few random loose knots, some of which the center core had fallen out or been pushed.

That church was heated by a airtight stove in the rear, and there was a pew next to the air tight, where my farther always sat so that he could "tend the fire" during the service without disturbing anyone.  It was likely the warmest seat in the house also, but that will be let slide by. Most of my male cousins sat in the rear opposite side, close to the door. I, been less than well behaved (talked a bit), was usually assigned a set at the far end of fathers pew, next to the window, and behind some elderly aunts and neighbors. The church  typically was getting warmish by the end of the service. Occasionally someone would come over and light the fire an hour before the service, so it would be somewhat warmer when we got there.

Anyway, DM, being a few years younger than myself, always was restless during the long boring services. His older brother, the one with a watch with a sweep second hand, often amused himself by counting the priests speaking rate. On cold days, the sermon could hit 150 words per minute, other time more like 100. On days when the priest had several services and lunch before, it could be down to 80 or 90. Something about the wine with lunch. It was something to do. Anyway, back to DM and this one knot hole. He found great joy sticking his finger in it and poking his sister who sat in front. We all found various things to do to pass the time quietly waiting for the time we could move about and do things.

Well as we age, even as youngsters time passes and fingers grow bigger and longer. Knot holes do not grow. You can see it now, the time his finger got stuck. Well his big sister leaned back, and pined his finger down to start with. Perhaps a bit of swelling happened. The poor little guy was trapped, with his finger in the knot hole for half the service, while the remainder of us had entertainment for the remainder of the service.

After the service, DM's father sent his brother over to the neighbors to borrow a saw. When DM heard that, he let out such a scream. "Not my finger, not my finger". Somebody got some snow and iced his figure, likely wetting it as well, and it came out. The saw was put to its intended us of making a knock to the knothole, so no kid could do that again. That was always know as DM knot hole after that. 

How Does One Organize Spaghetti

Spaghetti is a poison to one third of the population that is made from Durham wheat, a fall seeded variety of wheat, commonly called winter wheat. It is digested and absorbed slower that modern ground wheat, which makes it less damaging that red spring wheat but too hot for many of the descendants of norther European ancestry, or of Celtic or aboriginal ancestry. Modern wheat is even worse. Search Wheat Belly for more information. Add chemical fertilizer, and we have poison, but that is another story. See my other blogs for that stuff.

This is about sorting such things. When I was young, and writing computer programs with punch cards, with a stack a couple of yards high, and another yard of data cards, spaghetti program was the rage, with multi-branching logic streams, that lead to subroutines, functions, subprograms, error trapping routines, loop detection, file closing, m by n by o by g matrices, and other such things, all developed from pages and pages of flow charts and the like. What wonderful training for sorting spaghetti. Family histories resemble family trees with to much data, and no logical order to handle manipulable streams of unrelated data, something like sorting spaghetti to get it back into the package. Oh well.

I have several boxes of family records that I "inherited" from mother, that she, and some of my ancestors deemed important enough to save. It does not seem right that I throw them out. There also stories, bits of memory, that should be written so someone unnamed or even unborn could assemble these in something in the future. Who knows: a family trivia game? a computer game? a book? a blog? whatever.

We have no children to pass these on to, so I thought I would throw it out to the world and see what happens.    

Desiccation, Vibration, Rewetting

What happens when we take a soil, dry it out with big trees, so that it shrinks and cracks, vibrate and disturb that dry block of soil, so that some of those dry peds infill the cracks, add water via a wet summer, and what happens to the lateral pressure on adjacent house basement?

Who is at fault? the owner of the trees (2 owners, one has two, the other has about 10, but farther away), the person who did caused the vibration, or the homeowner for owning a house on high plastic soils?  Without any one, the problem would be lesser? The lawyers should have fun with that one.

Fill of unknown quality

The geotechnical investigation found fill. Now what?
Normal slab fill evaluation flow chart would look like this approximately:

Is the fill organic - if yes remove and replace.

If fill clean, do stepped test pits under the grade beam locations, through the fill, with densities and proctors. Steps provide access and benches to do densities without tieing up the backhoe. Mind OH&S. Under grade beam locations will less sensitive to the new backfill of the test pits.  

If fill is more than a year old, and density above 98%, good.

If density 98% to 95% expect some settlement, and allow for mud jacking in a few years, if settlements occur and is a problem.

If density <95%, rework or expect a lot of settlements, or structural pile supported slab. This can be done just in the office, where settlement is likely an issue.

It is the clients decision. The numbers may change with depth of fill and expected loads.

Tickets

Safety or Revenue?

Consider the "parking to close to a fire hydrant" or corner ticket for an answer. It it was for safety, the curb would be marked, so we were not guessing where the limit is at. There you simple answer. Revenue.

Photo Radar... Speed tax.

Interesting time we live in. The governments have become the highway men, robbing from the public traffic.

Other departments are just taxing to raise revenues for there wages. They produce little benefit. We live at a time of the acceleration of the decline of the western works try at democracy. Yes, I believe we have been in decline since about 1970. There is not a single date, as different parts or functions have different peaks. Communications, with the internet is changing the world fast.   

Bloody Big Trees

Once again, I have reviewed a residence that has undergone considerable damage from bloody big trees. This time, there was a new garage / storage library, attached to the house. Once again, I assume high plastic clay. There was an small existing garage that created uneven soil moisture (assumed). Floor slab movements since the first inspection indicate shallow highly non-uniform settlement. The entire garage on shallow piles, 12 feet, is also settling, more closed to the trees. This implies that the desiccated crust is thickening. The desiccated crust is the result of the first cycle since the deposit was deposited drying out. We are starting to see a lot of similar issues in that area. There is no easy solution, other than to construct on deep foundation, or no big trees.

The entire house is surrounded with massive spruce trees and little drainage. The major offending massive deciduous trees belong to the neighbor, and the City has several close by. Now what?

Beyond the scope

A client used one of our reports for application of work beyond the scope of the report, and the County used one line in the report as defense of a project, which it could not support. The client wants us to withdraw the restriction. Now what do we do?

First the report covered a building foundation and a slope stability of a critical portion of creek slope, but the no water features applied to the entire creek length through the property. The client build a storm water management facility, a holding pond, too close to the creek. It does not comply with Alberta Environment Guidelines in a number of areas.

We have not conducted analysis of the bank at that location. The client did not conduct any testing on the roadways; hence, they are not a good client.

So here is the essentials of the letter I provided.

As requested, we has reviewed geotechnical investigation at the above noted site.  The purpose was to examine our recommendations to disallow water features within 30 metres from the top of bank along the creek, for the purpose of allowing a storm water management facility (SWMF)  (storm water pond) at the top of bank at the south end.

First, any storm water pond must comply with Alberta Environment Guidelines for SWMFs. The proposed development is short in a number of ways, assuming the plan provided is the complete plan.

The report was conducted before any SWMF was proposed on any of the plans provided, and as a result, the SWMF was not considered. It is beyond the scope of the report, and the SWMF was designed and partly constructed without any geotechnical or enginnering input from us.

The water feature setbacks, for small slopes, are normally based on a soil dependent factor multiplied by the depth of the slope, and expressed as a distance from the top of the slope. For typical clay till, 6 to 8 times the depth of slope would be typical, in this case about 3 metres, producing a typical setback of 18 to 24 metres from the bottom of the toe. However, no testholes were conducted, and we are unsure if clay, clay till, of sand lenses are present at this location. No analysis has been conducted, and the required information has not been obtained. There is also a question of the point to measure from on the SWMF.

We expect that at this location, the 30 metre water feature restriction can be reduced, but without testholes, testing, and analysis, we are unable to logically provide an exact number at this location. In addition, there are inside pond slope issues and erosion issues that are not addressed in the plans provided to us.  A specific geotechnical investigation would be required to address the SWMF and the setback, along with redesign to comply with the current Alberta Environment guidelines.