Quake Damage

Over the past two years, when I was writing all those posts about earthquakes, I never suspected that I would be writing one about our own front yard.  Mother Nature had other ideas.

It started last year when the unprecedented drought hit Texas.  It caused a couple of small sinkholes and several fairly large cracks to appear here at the Boggy Thicket.  It also caused us to have to have the house re-leveled last May.

We thought that our worries were over, but then, yesterday morning, our toilets quit flushing.  I tried running a water hose down the line, and it seemed to work for a few minutes, but it soon became obvious that we needed professional help.

The plumbers came and their big roto-rooter machine snaked down the line for about forty feet before reaching a spot it could not chew through.  You could hear the thing thumping – actually feel the ground vibrating – which made it pretty easy to locate the stoppage. 

The plumbers broke out their shovels and began to dig, expecting to find a big root had penetrated the pipe.  What they found was that the earth had shifted in that spot, causing the pipe to offset and collapse. 

They cut out and replaced the damaged portion and everything went back to normal.  Crap still flows downhill, and the toilets work just the way they are supposed to.

The only residual problem is that they did not remove enough dirt from the hole to fill it back in.  Strange how that happens, but, if you look close at the picture above you’ll see that I need to bring in a wheelbarrow full of dirt or more to bring the area back to level.

As they were making the repairs, the head plumber (unintentional pun) told me “Nobody uses this thinner wall sewer pipe anymore.  It just doesn’t hold up.”

Hmmmn – Let’s see. 

It has lasted for over thirty years, and it took a catastrophic drought and displacement of the earth around it to cause it to fail – maybe that’s good enough.