The Baggage Room Basement - Digging The Sump Pit (Playing In Soupy, Muddy, Water!)

After a two week hiatus, we were at it again this morning.  Mike and Jesse have gone back to school so we had Brad and Corey with help from Bill S and Steve G to start the second major step in draining the swamp in the baggage room basement.

The key to any drainage project, whether it's a swamp, the bottom of a sewer trench or your basement, is a good sump pit.  I've seen sump pits so shallow that the sump pump works overtime constantly pumping out small pails of water at a time instead of 45 gallons.  Okay, so I exaggerate a bit on the volume but I have seen sump pumps burn out because the sump pit wasn't of large enough capacity.

In our case, we weren't going to have that problem because we had a 45-gallon steel barrel (kindly donated to the cause by Allan W) with both ends torched out (actually they were plasma-cuttered) and two 8" diameter holes cut in the sides as inlets for the "Big-O" drain tile that's going to be installed into trenches to be dug around the inner perimeter of the baggage room basement.

The challenge was to dig a hole 48" deep and 36" in diameter in sufficient time in thick gooey clay so that the hole didn't fill up with water before we had the hole finished.  So we started the usual task of digging out 2 shovels of thick mucky clay, dumping the clay into the plastic pails, with Corey, Brad, and Bill trucking them through the basements, up the stairs, across the tracks and dumping the clay over the edge of the berm.

In short order we had the hole dug down to 24" and so far the water was only a small trickle, easy to contend with.  Of course rubber boots were a necessity as, the deeper you dug the hole, the muckier it got to be.  Corey and Brad were kept busy with a continuous flow of pails full of clay and water going up the stairs and outside and a continuous flow of empty pails coming back downstairs.  (That's Corey in the photo below hiking full pails of wet clay out of the baggage room basement.  Each pail weighs a good 40-50 lbs.) 

It was a race against time as the minute I stopped digging to take a break, the water would come pouring in and no telling if we would have to abandon this hole.  With a bit of steady shovelling, we were able to get the hole down to 36" deep and we were still smiling as we seemed to be winning the race.  However, there was no time to stop for a break as you never knew if there was going to be a crack in the soft clay and a torrent of water might start pouring through.  (You can see that my shirt's a bit more wet than in the photo above.)

 It's at the depth of 36" that the soil structure starts to go through a drastic change.  Instead of thick clay, the soil starts to change into a porous gravel mixed in with clay.  That's when the water starts to pour in.  As you shuffle your feet around in the bottom of the hole, the clay and gravel turn into a soupy mess.  And the only way to shovel this stuff out is to use a McDonald's drink cup as a bailing can and bail the soupy mess out into a half-size plastic pail which you then dump into the large pails.  Don't try carting that mess outside as it will never make it.  It'll slop all over the place on its way up the stairs and out the door.  So we simply dumped it into one corner of the baggage room basement.  Give it a week or so to dry out and it will be solid clay.

By 11:30 (2 1/2 hours after we started), we had the hole down to 48" deep - the depth that we wanted.  You can see in the photo below how fast the water has started to seep into the hole from the surround clay and gravel.  That water is a good 3"-4" deep and below that is another 4"-6" of soupy clay. It took both Brad and Corey to haul me out of that hole as there was no way I could have climbed out all by myself. 

Brad and Corey took 6 pails down to the north end on one of the lorrys and filled the pails up with 1" clear septic bed crushed stone which they then hauled down the stairs, and into the baggage room basement.  I poured the 6 pails of crushed stone into the hole.  The crushed stone sank to the bottom and formed a firm foundation to set the 45-gallon steel barrel on.  I next placed some slabs of concrete block into the basement as a base for the sump pump.

In the meantime, the lads, along with Bill W and Steve G had gone back down to the North End to get another load of crushed stone, repeated the process of hauling it into the baggage room basement as I started to backfill the hole with crushed stone.  Twelve buckets of stone later we had the sump pit back-filled to the mid-point of the barrel and it was time to break for lunch.

After lunch it was another trip to the North End for another load of crushed stone and we soon had the hole backfilled to the top.  However, take a close look at the water level in the photo below and compare it to the levels in the photos above.  The photo below was taken at 2:30 and the photo above was taken at 11:30.  See how fast the water has risen in 3 hours.  I expect that by next Thursday the water will be right up to the top of the barrel.  That's how high the water table is in the basement.  Our objective is to lower that water table by 24".

With the hole now completely backfilled to the top of the barrel, it was time to clean up and put the tools away. 

Here's a photo of Corey and Brad inspecting the work before we invited the Board and guests to inspect the work.  They do look kind of fatigued.  And so was I. 

As I told the Board members who were there today, those guys have done a tremendous job.  Without them, I wouldn't have been able to even think about starting this job.  So, next time you see them, make sure you thank them for their efforts.

Next week, we'll be taking a different tack as we install the 2" rigid ABS plastic pipe that will take the water away via the sump pump.