Bah, humbug
A rainy day at Llewellyn School
When our house was built ~100 years ago, the gutter drains were neatly fed into underground pipes, which we thought were attached to the house sewer and would thus dump water into the city sewer system whenever it rained. The city thought this, too, and as a result of this we got a fairly substantial discount on our water bill when we capped a bunch of the gutter drains.
This year, however, we had our sidewalk condemned (the entire sidewalk, including a slab which was not buckled, lifted, or tilted in any noticable way; I will be having a chat with the sidewalk inspectors about this after ever other bit of the sidewalk is successfully redone [this is hopefully not too far in the future; the majority of the broken sidewalk has been removed and replaced with concrete bricks, and “all” we’re waiting on now is for me to cut some triangular concrete bricks (can’t just cast new ones or leave root cutouts sawedged, because that would be against the city sidewalk code! Thanks, tax-cut assholes who have left me doing construction on city property at my own expense!) and replace or remove the goddamn driveway apron]) and, as part of the demolition work, I came upon some sections of ceramic sewer pipe that were laid directly under the sidewalk, right next to a huge honking sweetgum root. I wasn’t sure what they were, but since they were all broken up and separated I didn’t think they were carrying anything, so I just finished breaking them and buried them under the ballast base for the concrete block sidewalk.
But when that section of the sidewalk was done, I was left with a large pile (4-5 tons) of broken concrete which I had to get rid of. The concrete left over from demolishing the back part of the driveway is still stacked up into bins in the driveway, so I couldn’t easily add this pile to that pile (see also: estimated weight of 4-5 tons) so, after some discussion and the construction of a prototype, I started excavating the front of our lawn to replace it with a concrete rubble wall. With pickaxe in hand, it was pretty trivial to dig out the first couple of meters of front yard, but then I ran into a large tangle of massive tree roots, and, after some initial cutting and removal, even more large ceramic sewer pipes that the massive tree roots were all snuggled up next to.
These sewer pipes were the ones that the gutters drained into, and I’m guessing that originally they just dumped out into the street. But by the time I’d gotten to them, they had become merely a nice watering drain for the sweetgum trees, and the massive tangle of roots had managed to work their way into these pipes so that all of that lovely water would go directly to the trees instead of being wasted in the street.
This would not have been a problem except that the roots are in the way of the wall, and have to be removed. Some of these roots are as big around as my upper arms (which are, thanks to this horrible sidewalk project, no longer the pleasingly twig-like form that you’d expect from an (ex-) computer programmer. It’s kind of unnatural.) It took me 2 hours to excavate the first two meters of notch for the wall, but it’s (so far) taken me about 6 hours to cut the first layer of these stupid roots that are in the way of the second three meters of yard front.
And, of course, it’s raining today. And cold, and guess who didn’t have the good sense to throw in the towel and try to get 50 more km on my bicycle? There’s something about spending three hours knee-deep in a claypit trying to saw through wood that’s half-buried in clay muck that makes the idea of living in a desert seem really appealing.
Perhaps I’ll use dynamite – or low-yield nuclear devices – to finish the job tomorrow.
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The worst thing about this lot is that it’s many iterations of “scrape the clay away from a root (in two places,) then saw through twice, remove the section, then dig down an inch and find another thrice-damned root. And the big honking roots go deep enough so I have to dig deep holes in a confined space (the wall is next to the new sidewalk, so if I dig too far that way I hit the ballast bed and blow out the new brick surface, and if I dig too far the OTHER way I run into the water inlet pipe for the house (which was conveniently installed no deeper than 20 cm underground on a heavily trafficked yard) and the hilarity that would ensue if I managed to rupture it by an overly enthusiastic swing of the mattock, so I’m sitting in a large hole poking the (pull-)saw down into a little hole and condemning my immortal soul to the hells of at least four major religions by my commentary regarding the root.
And there isn’t much leverage except for the little bit that’s provided when I pull on the saw. I suppose I could get a couple of 16 tonne bottle jacks and a lifting beam, then throw a strap under the root and see what uproots itself when I start pumping on the jacks…
Sidewalks, every place I’ve lived, have always been the responsibility of the home owner. It is your land on which the city has an easement. Around here, If the sidewalk needs to be fixed, the city will fix it (with warning) and bill the home owner. The city prices are two or three times higher than a private concrete contractor. In San Diego, you can’t repair your sidewalk before the city determines it needs to be repaired.
A few places I’ve lived, when the city seals or resurfaces the asphalt road, they bill the property owners on that road. Consequently, the poorer neighborhoods have the worst roads.
Infrastructure maintenance is a complex mess of bureaucratic indirections.
The sidewalk inspectors here claim that it’s actually city property, and there are ongoing debates over who-pays-what because “the streets are city property” (leafsweeping is paid for by the city, as is street repair; sidewalk repair is paid for by the homeowner, as is the cost of initially installing a street (this is one of the big debates here, because Southeast Portland has many unpaved streets which are unpaved because the homeowners are, understandably, not particularly enthusiastic about the idea of paying for a proper street.)
Have you got enough drainage anywhere, possibly by digging a deepish hole at one end, that you can take a hose to the root face?
From the sounds of this you’re trying to sink the footings of a wall between the yard, which curves up some, and the sidewalk, which is a bit below the level of the yard. Any of those old pipes actually drain?
Because dealing with roots is way easier if you’ve washed all the clay away from around them, and a decent pressure tip on a garden hose is often plenty to do that, and it won’t do anything to the water feed pipe.
I don’t know if any of the old pipes still drain – I’d suspect not, because I crushed the downstream pipes with a mallet before I ballasted the sidewalk trench – but even if they did they are above the level of the excavations I had to do to cut out the last big root.
And even if it did drain I’d not want to convert the working surface into a mudpit – I’ve still got to break open two large mudballs that contain my boots from the last time I was working in the mudpit.
Cheap electric chainsaw (~$29) & a gfi outlet - whatever damage you do to the chainsaw, $29 + tax will fix it, at least for now… - darms
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If you’re sawing roots in wet clay, or worse, chopping them, they tend to squodge and shake which makes life very difficult.
I have found it easier to tension the root somehow; the easiest way to do that is one of those literal chain saws – a length of chainsaw chain with handles – and cutting up.
If that’s not an option, wedges and levers and things to get some rigidity into the root can be a huge help; standing on one end of the 2x4 over which the root is stretched while being sawed upon sort of thing.
This may all be teaching granny to suck eggs, but hey; it might be helpful, too.