| the situation |
| many
moons
ago the 3 homes to the east of me sold their back lots (prolly
about 3 acres combined) to build a zero lot line neighborhood
called clanlo. now while i'm sure that it is a lovely establishment
with friendly people, i've got a major gripe with the place -
below is that gripes saga. |
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| now
as many of you may already know, in february of 2K2 i put in 145
holly bushes in an effort to clean up and secure the back
yard. |
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| for
the most part, it has been a tremendous success.
only 1 of the 145 has croaked while the remaining
144 have grown over a foot each. eventually these
guys will reach 15 feet tall each and form one continuous
prickly hedge... much better than a fence. |
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| all
was going pretty well until we started having some
pretty large storms last fall. i would come out after
a storm only to find that all my $mulch$ had
washed away and the root balls of all my newly planted
bushes
were exposed - not cool at all. |
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| the problem |
| after
unsuccessfully fighting the problem with more mulch, i decided
to do a little investigating one night during a heavy rain storm.
what i found was frightening! armed with a rain coat
and a 2,000,000 candlepower Q-beam (come on, @ what point do
we quit comparing flashlights with some silly candle ratio anyway)
i went out in the rain to find a flowing river of water headed
towards the NW most corner of my lot. The depth at the basin
of this river was over 2 feet! i knew right then that something
funny
was going on - there was no way all this was my water. further
investigation by the staff @ richardvining.com would prove me
right. |
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| to
the left is an aerial view of our block. while my lot
is outlined with a white box, clanlo is outlined in
red. in clanlo, the entire 3 acres was built up and
leveled in such a way so that 1/2 the water goes east
and 1/2 runs off to the west. |
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| while
there are storm drains in the street, the vast majority
of the water that lands onto the roofs of the 7 houses
on the west side of the neighborhood is collected in
gutters that deposit the water into a system of underground
pipes that are aimed right @ my fence line. in some
cases, holes had been cut in the chain link as so to
allow for total free flow. once again...not cool! |
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| it is highly
suspected that this is where my "river" comes from
- not my own natural runoff. in addition, all the water that
lands on the driveways of houses 1,4,5,7 (the western border
of clanlo) also filters over to my yard. |
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| the
preliminary solution |
| since
this discovery, i've made several minor attempts to curb
this problem (one of which involved great-stuff
foam and those strategically aimed drain pipes) but
none of these measures worked - the water just continued
to find ways to sweep across my lot. however, it wasn't
until i had some bushes die from having all their roots
exposed by the runoff that i decided to take all this
a little more seriously. if the water was not stopped
soon, more bush deaths were sure to follow. it was time
to get serious, and serious came in the way of a 300
foot long wood dam. |
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| the
"ok, now i'm serious" solution |
| after losing
$240 dollars in bushes to this problem (4 x $ 60) and dropping
another $400 or so in mulch, spending $200 dollars at the depot
on wood,
stakes and silt fences seemed like a bargain. besides, there
is a certain satisfaction that comes with sticking to the
official 1572 mantra - "you have to spend money to save
money" |
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| materials |
 18
- 16'x12" pressure treated boards |
| 20
- 1"x4" boards for stakes |
| 3
- 100' silt fences |
| 10
lbs of screws |
| |
| as
you can see, if my yard had been any longer i would have
had to rent a truck. as it was, this stuff just about
had the rear wheels stuffed into the fenders. seeing
how i have a 6 foot bed and a 2 foot tailgate (8 feet
total) i basically had a teetet-totter thing going with
those 16 foot long boards. fortunately, the fork lift
guy at the depot helped me tie things down. to be sure
he added some weight to the top to create what the called
a "mathematical advantage". |
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| now
while i'm just a guy with too much time and a web page,
i think he may have meant "mechanical". either way,
he was driving a forklift... so i didn't argue. |
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| one
of the really cool things about this project was that
i got to drive my truck around in the back yard. i
can't really explain why that was cool, but if you
are a guy... you get what i mean. driving around in
a yard is usually an activity reserved for "moving
day" when your trying to get as close to the front
door as possible. |
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| anyway,
the first thing i did was spread all the 16 foot long
boards out along bush line. |
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|
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| doing
this really gave the project some scale. at
one point i thought to myself "hmmm, this might
take all afternoon". |
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| 3
days later... this is what i had. the hope was that
the water would come thru the neighboring chain link,
hit the boards, then proceed north. about one inch
of each board is in a trench to help create a seal,
so by my math that give me about 11 inches of added
flood protection. |
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| about
a week or so later my creation faced its first test.
a rather heavy rainstorm came to town at around 11
pm so i put on my boots, grabbed |
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| my
Q-Beam and trudged out to |
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take
a look. results were less than positive. <insert
fuming anger here>
|
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| what appeared
to be going on was that water was hitting the dam and just collecting
there. the "northerly flow" that i had counted on
was not happening. as a result, after enough rain fell the water
would just spill
over the 11 inch dam. basically all i had created was a flood
delay system. i tried to convince
myself that the system was somewhat a success by saying "at
least the thing doesn't leak", but even that proved false
over time. you see, after the rain quit falling there would be
this 11 inch
deep non flowing river just sitting there. eventually that water
slowly seeped its way into my yard anyway. while this did decrease
the speed of the water flow to the point where it no longer washes
away all the $mulch$,
that was no longer the point of this exercise. i wanted total
victory. |
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| not knowing
how to get my hand on 300 feet of those highway
dividers, i decided to give this project (and my blood pressure)
a rest. during this interim some inspiration came in the form
of Summer Storm
2K3. |
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|
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| when
the storm hit, my next door neighbor (no, not the
ones from the clanlo side) lost a tree that had a
lot of monkey grass under it. a decision was made
to grind up the stump and just put in grass instead.
that meant that all that monkey grass had to be dug
up and disposed of. |
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| this
is when rex (the lead landscaper dude) suggested
that we "re-purpose" the
monkey grass to behind my dam. his idea was to build
what would equivocate into a 14 inch tall living
levee that would only grow stronger with time as
the root system took off. |
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 action
photo of boards, grass and silt fence |
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|
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| accompanied
by one of those "construction site style" silt fences
installed on the inside of the boards, i had a feeling that this
idea had
to work...
and it has with one exception. we only had enough monkey grass
for about 200 feet. therefore we are about 4 pickup truck loads
short. right now the 2/3rds of the levee that exists does an
amazing job of funneling all the water to the 1/3 that is sans-monkey
grass. the result is a compounded water flow what would have
made the lifeguard at the Adventure River Wave Pool nervous;
so i need your help. |
| |
| call
to action |
| if you happen
to have any dirt, bermuda or monkey grass please give me a call.
i desperately want to finish this project before the spring rain
starts to hit. i'll handle all the pickup and delivery, or
if you prefer... i'll
even let you deliver it so that you can drive in my yard. thanks
for reading, i'll keep you posted as to when this year long project
is complete. |
