Reshaping a drainage ditch to achieve fall

this is shawn with gate city foundation drainage we are on a pretty big job down in archdale so let's take a look first thing we've got here is all this dirt in the parking lot and what happens is you get like a foot of water in through here so the problem here is this swale fills up and the water can't escape fast enough so take a look at the bottom here you can see this is all dry and let me speed up a little bit so right here it's wet and so that's telling us that this is a low point here and this is higher over here and so that's just going to create back pressure for the the water to escape out of here so i was climbing around down in here a little bit and what i'm you can see there is water in here so what i'm going to do is blow all this out blow all this out and drop this ditch down a little bit and so that's the first part of this project we got five little pieces to this project here in this apartment complex so i've got the big excavator here we're going to put the dirt that comes out in the back of the old dump truck and move it to a different part of the site and we got the little bobcat here as well i was talking to one of the residents out here while we were working and they were kind enough to send me this footage of them out playing in the puddle during the last big here you can see i'm in this the outfall area where it heads down to the creek i've got the grading bucket for the big excavator here and the first order of business is just to clean out the ditch going to the creek and some of these rip-rap rocks i want to save so i'm just piling them over here off to the side for to be used later and i brought a bunch of help with me but i told everybody i was like you know i'm going to be pretty much digging on this trench with the big excavator here so you know don't feel like you all have to be busy all day long because it's just going to be me digging for a while on this job [Music] so so [Music] oh once i got that ditch opened up a little bit they were down there trying to clean out some of that riprap and so they were throwing it over there where i could reach it with the excavator and while they were doing that i started blowing out the rest of this big bank here and you can just barely see the old dump truck there off to the right and we start piling and loading it up i've been working on this ditch for maybe about 45 minutes maybe half an hour so and i wanted to show you really quickly what's happening so now that we've got this dug down where it's supposed to be it is flowing so look at all that water that's flowing through there and the guys are over in here working on it too making sure it's going to reach the creek long as it gets down into here this is way lower so this will i mean this whole thing can fill up so we're good i mean it's looking really good it's about to make contact with it three two one got a place to flow so you're saying water doesn't want to flow uphill it does not wants to flow downhill imagine that it will find a way okay nice so i've almost got a feeling that all that rip wrap is not going to go back in here that whole pile unless you want to armor the sides i don't think we do as you just saw looking at that creek we did not put any riprap back in there because that would have just interfered with our the flow but in the main part of this whale here what we're doing is we're we're pulling the rip wrap out setting it off to the side and then we're going to dig out the swale and then put the rip rack back in and so that's how we're going to achieve dropping our the elevation down now that we've got the rip wrap out of the way i'm going in for the dirt so i'm digging this dirt out loading it in the back of the dump truck and then we're going to move that to a different place on the same site yeah whatever works we got our first load of dirt out of here oh yeah although it was not part of the job since we had the mini skid here we went ahead and got all this dirt and muck cleaned up from the parking lot while we were here all right i've got this pretty well dug out at the outfall here so i think what i want to do now the problem here is we have to separate out the rip wrap from the dirt so i think i'm going to bring the excavator over here pull the riprap back this way and then get the dump truck back in here and try to dig out the dirt and then hopefully i can pull the riprap back in so the whole reason this is not flowing is because it's not falling correctly and look at how deep we are over here now my fixed point here was pretty much the level of a creek so the creek is quite a bit lower over here and so we just dug all this out of here we've also got this culvert we got to get this all uncovered again but look at the look at the fall we've got now so now all we need to do is link this the height of this over to our our inlet over there and that's going to make this thing flow really well it's all i mean it's already flowing look at this so anybody can line a channel with riprap but that doesn't mean it's going to flow right it's got to be falling correctly i wanted to show you really quickly there's a crayfish living in here maybe we should take them down there and if i was out here doing a wetland survey and i sampled a crayfish the state of north carolina would consider this a permanent stream so i don't necessarily agree with that but uh this was definitely holding a lot of water through here [Music] [Music] right there can we tell you our hourly rate for showing off how deep is it so let me show you what happened here hopefully you can see this wire this was a splice so this was already damaged at one point and what happened i didn't actually hit this when i was digging down i must have moved some rocks around somehow and the splice pulled out so there it is over there right here so the splice pulled out and this building's dead now so what the cable guys are going to do they're going to put a new pedestal right here and a new pedestal right there so this doesn't happen again this digging is hard work where's the excavator all right we just got this main wire exposed on this side so they're going to put a pedestal right there and a pedestal right here and somebody's on his way from the shop with a piece of conduit we're going to lay the conduit in there and they're going to get a temporary going to get everybody back up and running so we can finish digging that little wire right there is dead now we can dig it all up and uh put the conduit in cover the conduit back up and we'll be in good shape [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we've got another part of the job here at the apartment complex and the dirt is going to be going over there so we're going to repurpose the dirt that's coming out of here so let me show you that really quickly i'm over here at another part of the job where we're supposed to be delivering the dirt and the siding people were supposed to move this stuff out of the way so the roofing people have this forklift here and they're coming over here to help me out so it's been a little bit frustrating trying to get this done three or four people have told them to do it they haven't done it so we've been piling dirt over there so now we got to move it again the dirt's got to go in right here to fill in all this let's go i had called 8-1-1 like i do for all the jobs but it was almost impossible to get them to mark everything because we were working all over this apartment complex i didn't know unit numbers and all that kind of stuff and so whenever spectrum showed up and i realized that i had broken a line i said you know what do you guys need me to do what do you need me to dig that kind of thing and so just a willingness to help out if you do break a line it goes a long long way and when they decided they wanted to put this conduit in the fact that they could get me to dig it they were super happy about that and so we we offered to dig the the trench for the conduit they brought in the conduit did the splices and everybody was back up and running in no time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay i think i'm finished digging this thing out so you can see that now we're quite a bit lower than the parking lot here so there's our new channel and i don't think i want to put a bunch of rip rap in here to slow the water back down i think i want to haul a lot of this rip rap out of here so that was a little bit different than what i had planned to do but after looking at this and thinking about it for a minute i just don't think i want to just pile a bunch of rip wrap back in here i want to keep this channel open so we also have power over here this is power going from one building to the next and i talked to the property manager he said it's that little box right there and it's the outdoor lighting so this doesn't really want to go down too much so we're going to have to try to maybe hand place some rip wrap on this and uh try to babysit that a little bit we didn't cut it or break it there's a coupling right here that cracked so we tested it it's hot luckily we didn't break it jeremy and ronald are getting that conduit in that the cable people left for us so that'll be done they were really happy about that [Music] [Music] we are finished with the first part of this job so this is item one of five so here's our new swale we had five dump trucks of dirt and mud and muck that came out of here and so we dug it down quite a bit and put the riprap back in there so there's a ton of water in here too and this will eventually fill in and make itself a little channel here you can see all the rip wraps all muddy we need a good rain to get this washed in a little bit but the point is it's now flowing like mad so none of this was flowing earlier today so we've got this flowing here and jeremy dug this culvert all out and he said there was a massive river that came out of it and so we didn't catch it on film though but you can see where it blew all this debris out and so this was part of the deal in my quote i said i was going to dig this all out and get this flowing correctly as well so the guys dug this out by hand pretty much now you have water flowing through here and the rip wrap just couldn't go back in here because it would have done the same thing it did before so just throwing rip-rap in a channel is not calling it a drainage solution so now this thing is actually running where it should be a bunch of the extra rip-rap ended up here on this trying to armor this a little bit really just trying to put it somewhere and then the dump truck had a load of rip-rap that went back so we will be back here and then of course we got our temporary line or the cable guys got their temporary line and we got the conduit in here so we had called but we were out here a little bit early and we didn't cut the line but we bumped the line and that was enough to pull it out of the splice so anytime you hit a cable like that when the cable guys come out here to fix it make sure you help out so i was here asking them what they needed if i could do anything the supervisor was like you've been out here helping us so i'm not gonna worry about this he said you're gonna you're gonna dig this conduit in here for us it's gonna save us a ton of work a ton of trouble so he said you know no worries about that so if you do hit a utility stick around try to be super helpful don't be a jerk about it and usually they're pretty cool about it so luckily he didn't charge us and we tried to do a good job getting that that conduit in so he's going to put a pedestal here and a pedestal here and then the conduit will be underneath the channel here so we'll be back tomorrow for item number two i'm back out here it's been a few weeks and it's finally raining so check out what the culvert's doing the culvert's taking water like it's supposed to and there's no standing water like there was before and this guy is taking water like it's supposed to oh they still haven't taken and redone that that's okay it's working okay well that's good news that's good that one's fixed foreign

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 73,207

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Id: LArbYRZC_IQ

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021