On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:23:00 -0600, Ignoramus19744
wrote:

On 2011-12-01, DanG wrote:
On 11/30/2011 10:22 PM, Steve B wrote:
id wrote in message
...

I have a gravel road that deteriorated, has huge puddles when it
rains, and the water enters the building from the side.

http://yabe.chudov.com/Enterprise-Du...-8975.jpg.html

The problem, I think, is that the slight grade that is there, is kind
of ruined and so the water does not go down along the road towards the
rain sewer. Instead, it puddles and some goes into my building.

Can this skid steer pictured he

http://igor.chudov.com/misc/ebay/tmp...i/291.JPG.html

be used to rearrange that gravel a little bit to restore the grade?

Or is it too light duty?

thanks

Call for a truck or three of gravel and spread it out.

Done.

Quickly.

Steve




NO This is probably why he is having the problem. If you just raise
the exterior grade without making provision for drainage you are just
compounding the problem. I would imagine that the building has weep
holes one or two bricks below finish floor. This becomes the highest
possible point for exterior grade - everything else has to be below that.

This is my thinking exactly, that adding stuff to the road is the
wrong solution. I think that the road needs gravel removed or moved to
the side.

No, gravel allows water to flow through it easily. It's the dirt road
underneath which needs the grading. Then a flat load of gravel on top
would be OK.

--
Intuition isn't the enemy, but the ally, of reason.
-- John Kord Lagemann

In article ,
Larry Jaques wrote:

No, gravel allows water to flow through it easily. It's the dirt road
underneath which needs the grading. Then a flat load of gravel on top
would be OK.

Not in Chicagoland, or anywhere else it freezes, and then rains later.
Plugs up with ice and makes a dam until springtime... and not everything
that falls once it's frozen is also conveniently frozen.

The surface grade should be below the building floor, and sloped away
from the building at least 1/8" per foot, preferably for 10-12 feet at
least. If that's impossible, you need serious drainage work - but I
suspect that Igor can just adjust the grade and come out fine, if the
building was not built to fail in the first place (ie, with a slab floor
below grade and no drains below the level of the slab floor.)

To see how your drainage can work, start where this is supposed to dump
into the street, and check that against the floor level at the far end
of the building. Inches of drop divided by feet back along the road +
feet from far side of road (where you want the water to be as it runs to
the street) tells you maximum slope available. Take the first inch and a
half going sideways as primary (1/8" per foot 12 feet out from
building), so that any water pooling pools away from the building, then
take whatever drop you have left and that's what you have left to get
water further away, and into the street drain. Toward the front of the
building, let the near side of the road drop (still keeping the whole
road sloped away from the building), and increase the slope from the
building to the road, so that the road as a whole leads water to the
street.

If you set stakes at the building (or building side of the road) every
10-20 feet, and stakes at the far side of the road (or property line,
however that works) with marks say 30" above your desired grade, it's
easy to recheck progress without a level, by running strings from the
mark at the building to the mark at the road-edge, and then sighting two
strings (for the reference plane) against a mark 30" up a rake handle.
Chalk the high spots, take down the strings, run the machine, chew the
chalked areas, recheck. At some point, just use the rake on the high
spots, dragging towards the low spots. If the grade marks are accurate,
the result will be as well.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.

On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:42:59 -0500, Ecnerwal
wrote:

In article ,
Larry Jaques wrote:

No, gravel allows water to flow through it easily. It's the dirt road
underneath which needs the grading. Then a flat load of gravel on top
would be OK.

Not in Chicagoland, or anywhere else it freezes, and then rains later.
Plugs up with ice and makes a dam until springtime... and not everything
that falls once it's frozen is also conveniently frozen.

Heh! I forget that people actually live in places like that.

I suppose I was also assuming that the grade had originally been good,
but hadn't been maintained in years.

--
Intuition isn't the enemy, but the ally, of reason.
-- John Kord Lagemann