I concur


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Posted by David Sherman [216.18.131.237] on Friday, March 26, 2010 at 14:04:26 :

In Reply to: Re: Home depot? Lowes? posted by Keith in Washington [24.41.41.111] on Friday, March 26, 2010 at 12:41:50 :

What he needs is a geotechnical study; if not a formal one, at least a casual understanding of why the house is sinking. Different causes require different solutions. If the problem is just uncompacted fill on fairly level ground, it's probably done settling and it will be fine. If it's woody debris rotting, it could take 100 years before it's done. Both were common in houses built during the post-war building boom. I knew one man who had a perfectly nice looking post-war suburban tract house with a giant fir stump in his basement. The builder didn't want to grub or blast it out, so he just built the house around it.

If it's on a hillside, as mentioned, it can get serious. I knew one house where the guy noticed a crack in his foundation wall around Thanksgiving, which grew noticeably as the fall rains soaked the ground. By Christmas he moved out, and shortly thereafter half the house broke loose, slid down the hill, and out onto the beach, while the other half stayed on the hill. This was the standard situation of building on top of glacial till that was sitting on slick gray clay, which in this case dipped towards the beach.

The way the engineers handle these sorts of sites nowadays, if the government will even allow building on them, is by drilling down into the clay layer. Generally if you can get your pilings, pins, sonotubes, I-beans or whatever down a few feet into the clay such that the house is essentially on stilts even though it looks like it's on dirt, it will be stable. On the site where the house split in half, some yuppies eventually built a million dollar McMansion, up on stilts. It looks stupid, but they had the engineering done and it's been stable.

There are also plenty of sites around the sound that simply should not be built on, although many of them have been, such as the Southwest side of Magnolia. There are slow-motion landslides in lots of places, as evidenced by lumpy ground and trees that are never quite vertical. Bedrock seems to be nonexistent along the bluffs. The best you can hope for is hardpan or dry gray clay.



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