Importance of Compaction when Installing ATLAS Culverts

guys welcome back to another episode of Atlas from rival shelters I hope you're all doing well today I'm going to do a video about the importance of compaction when installing a culvert pipe sometimes there's a some misleading information out there showing culvert pipe and it's absolute worst situation now this would be a piece of culvert pipe that would be under a road where the roads collapse and the pipe is crushed a properly installed piece of culvert pipe there's nothing stronger in the world matter of fact it will go deeper than any type of material including a square shelter most concrete shelters it's just very strong but the key is in the compaction of the soil if you take a shelter and if you put it in the ground and you just dump dirt over it and you do not compact it going up that pipe will more than likely do this right here it will cave in but if you properly install it and you can pack the earth about every 12 inches as you get over the hunt and the hunt is the halfway point and you've got to make sure that you get under the under the hunts as well which is the part underneath that you got to get it packed then that pipe will stay strong it will stay strong for a long long time now people ask me how long will the corrugated pipe last from the manufacturer the estimated life of corrugated pipe is 200 years now most of it only lasts about 50 to 60 years because it's under road and waters running through it it's grabbing branches as dragging rocks and it's scraping off the galvanized material and that's what makes the pipe eventually rust when we put a culvert pipe in the ground for you guys and we cover it with earth no water is running through it we have actually dug up a shelter that was 15 years old and it came other ground is shiny as the day it probably went in the ground I mean it looked brand spanking new so the idea that they're going to cave in rust or any other horrible myths that somebody may make up about him is this absolutely a worst-case scenario and it's not relevant to the shelters when we weld the ends on the shelters it becomes a tight little tube and it has strength I've actually seen shelters go in where they didn't even compact the earth and the pipe held up well but the longer the pipe the weaker it could get in the middle so the compaction is very important so in the video today I found a video on YouTube so I'm going to commit a little plug tourism here I'm actually going to show you a video of two guys and they're going to show proper compaction of Earth around culvert pipe so I hope you guys enjoy this videos it shows you the importance and how strong it is Marv fact you could take your toilet paper roll you could go out in your yard dig out a little ditch and if you put it in if you pack the earth on it right you could stand on top of that little toilet paper roll out of your bathroom and it wouldn't even deflect so there is nothing stronger than the natural arc so guys I hope you enjoy this video I'll see you at the end [Music] good day my name is Pete Coughlin I'm director of the Maine local Road Center in the great state of Maine and my assistant here is Robert Stevens I'm the technician for Maine locomotive Center and Bobby and I have been working with the local Road Center for what Bob thirty years or something twenty-five years I can't remember what 87 we lose track but today we're gonna talk to you about the importance of compaction around culverts that you put in the ground could be as simple as a cross culvert that you need to replace in your town and we're gonna we've got a demonstration here we're going to show you which is about the importance of compaction around the pipes typical practice in it it's not you don't have to go too far to see that when people replace a call but they'll simply go in and excavate the pipe out of the ground and they'll buy a new pipe and put it in be it plastic of metal and may or may not do any compaction basically put the backfill back in maybe roll some equipment over a little bit the backhoe of the loader and then walk away and the point here is that the stress from traffic and loads coming over it from from vehicles has an impact on the pipe itself what we're trying to show here is where the stress from vehicles should be placed and that's on the soil around the pipe which then leads to the importance of why you should compact your material in your backfill around the pipe as you go so we've got a demonstration here today we're going to run you two versions the first one is we've got a simple little pipe here and this is nothing more than flue pipe that we went down to the hardware stores pretty thin gauge we had to use some duct tape here cost just to hold it together but this is about as long as you can get this is our so-called culvert and we put it in this little box we already put a little material down on the bottom this to simulate our trench and we're about to backfill this by simply throwing some gravel on top of it and I'm going to put a little pressure on it and we'll see what happens to the pipe so Bob we're ready to backfill with a little bit of dirt okay you get a cup over there I'll take one you take one and we're just going to start back filling around the pipe typically we'd want to do it as evenly as some can on each side so Bob why don't you put your eyes in there spread it out a little bit get a little dusty here but I'm just gonna for the heck of it smooth it out pound it a little bit here that's for stage two when we really want to do some compaction all right I'm the excavator you can be the level man in fact let's just do this Bob yeah we'll just how's that well let's put a little more in there just we'll just dump it right in even that right up okay so we've got the pipe in the ground and we throw a little cold patch on maybe just to patch the pipe up but here's what happens when you put a little pressure on the pipe and I could use my hand but I'm just gonna try this with my foot and I'm just gonna gently push Bob come here I need to need to lean on you I don't want to break the glass but here's here's the emotion or traffic going over it and you can see where the weight is going now if I push I don't want to break the glass but it is crushed I can't even tell from up here but it doesn't take a whole lot to push that and obviously it's a flimsy pipe Wow so I really did a number on that and it's not that when you have your pipe out on the ground out there that it's gonna look like this but the point here is that if you don't compact where is all the stress in this case for my foot going so many psi is going to the dirt and pretty much on the pipe so we're relying basically on the structural integrity of the pipe the thickness of the the metal or the stiffness of the plastic or maybe concrete which is obviously a lot stronger but you're essentially saying we're going to put all the weight on the pipe and not on the soil and with the pipe here it's pretty flimsy obviously we see what happens here so now we're going to clean this out and we're going to start over again with a different pipe same pipe but we're gonna we're gonna give it a little compaction at this point so let's just clean this pipe let's clean the box up pop and then we'll we'll start her over again [Music] so we're back and we just cleaned the box out and here's our pipe that we took out and you can see that it got flattened pretty good I don't think we'll be able to use that one again Bob so we cleaned it out cleaned our glass off a little bit and now we're just going to we're going to compact things a little bit as we put stuff back in the box Oh Bob if you want to start filling here I'm going to hold the pipe kind of into place and maybe if you could fill it up halfway around the pipe you may have to turn your excavator to speed up a little bit faster that's pretty bony material here no more bowing I'll pound some sand so to speak this is our I mean this could be as simple as a little hand tamper let alone a mechanical one imitates the whacker yep all right go for it so well bulbs filling here one could say well you know we don't have a wack are available you know we don't we don't have the money to to rent a mechanical one well you can see here shortly what the impact that's going to be I mean you could pretty much fabricate a hand whacker just a metal plate that would do the job for you and of course in the future if you did a lot of these things it might be good to lease rent a mechanical whacker once in a while yeah see I'm not really hitting this too hard either I'm just trying to make sure it's all packed into place especially right around the pipe and when you do this if you're doing this in the field I mean obviously the hardest place to get at is down on the haunches down here underneath because when you just backfill pipe without doing this you end up maybe with some space under here and that's where all your pressure is for your pipe it's it's really exerted right here and if you don't pack anything there then there's no there's no ability for the the loads to be transferred to the soil came up we still get a round pipe you dump and I'll spread okay yeah we just barely have a lot on top of the pipe here come down this side on the side alright sure no actually they I remember we're gonna get the same effect here Bob if if you hadn't to put that last load in and it looks like we got quite a bit of material here on top of the pipe but it's really only do you think two inches maybe we could do this like a Mythbusters feet all right what do you think Bob Wacken done pound and sand all right let's uh you get in position over here again I'm gonna stand on top of this actually I'm gonna put both feet in if I can all right now I'm gonna what are we seeing down there any movement mr. cameraman do you see anything down there just a round pipe so here I am I won't say how much I weigh here but let's say it's got a two in the beginning and you can see that there's a lot of pressure put on that with two inches of material on top and nothing's moving so what's that tell us Bob where's where's all my my so-called PSI my pounds per square inch where is it going it's going around the pipe so in other words all of the stress from my feet here is being absorbed by the material and the pipe is really just acting as a sleeve of material to carry water or something maybe fish through the through the pipe but all my stress from tractor-trailers and cement trucks and everything else is now being just transferred directly to the material all around it I'm gonna do that again okay so with only an inch and a half of material on it I think the point here is that it's pretty visible that when you when you don't do any compaction this is what happens and in the field even though this may be a 24-inch pipe with whatever 12 gauge that overtime with the pressure of the trucks going on top of this it's going to get weakened but because most of the weight is being taken by the pipe itself and not the soil here this essentially says that you could put pipes in the ground that are that thickness with some sort of compacted material on the top and what would happen so any sort of weight you put on it as flimsy as that maybe is distributor in the soil and not the pipe itself so we don't have to depend on the structural gauge the thickness of the strength of the pipe itself right okay well good that's what we were trying to show it and I hope this makes you think maybe a little bit about when you put in your next pipe across your road that you decide to pound a little sand or too little compaction or whatever you want to call it because yeah I think you can see the benefits of even minimal amount of compaction is going to buy you lots of time and lots of time in the future and it really isn't going to cost you really any additional money and it's and it's not gonna really take a whole lot more time to put your pipes in I've heard people say that well you know if we're trying to put in ten pipes a day we're only going to be able to put in six now if we have to do this well sometime in the future you're going to have to go back and probably take care of pipes like this if you have the time to do it then then you probably have the time in the beginning to do it right the first time so with that Pete and Bob signing off thank you very much from the state of Maine hope you enjoyed the little demo yeah thanks Bob okay see you later so guys I hope you enjoyed that I hope you learned something you know I found this video on YouTube and guess what they could probably just explain it better than I did without me having to get out there and do it so guys as always I love you if you're not us member to my to my youtube channel make sure you like and subscribe and as always share my videos when you like him guys love you see on the next video you

Channel: Atlas Survival Shelters

Views: 25,554

Rating: 4.9163637 out of 5

Keywords: Shelters, shelter, underground, protection, nuclear fallout, fallout, Atlas, survival, prepping, preppers, water filtration, systems, living, off grid, sustainable, safety, security, family, fun, travel, atlas, culvert

Id: qiWGGwcgtHE

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019