The Gift Shop Basement - A New Start

With the cleanup of the excavated clay from the baggage room basement last week, we started today on the gift shop basement.  While this basement is located right next door to the stairs going outside, thereby being the shortest distance outside to the dumping area, it is probably going to be the trickiest, dirtiest, and messiest of the three basements we are going to tackle.

This basement was backfilled with clay when the station was built back in 1910 with the level of the clay being anywhere from 12"' to 24"' higher than it's next-door cousin, the furnace room basement.  This latter basement is the only one of the 5 basements to have a concrete floor.  Water from the gift shop basement is continually leaking underneath the concrete footings and into the furnace room basement.  Which means that the clay in the gift shop basement is a soggy, laden mess. The only drainage from this basement is a 2" ABS plastic pipe that was somehow inserted through the concrete wall from the furnace room into the gift shop basement.  This pipe finds its way over to the edge of the sump pump in the furnace room.  Not exactly the best drainage system but nevertheless it was all that we had (or could afford) at the time. 

Our objective is to turn this basement into something similar to what we did in the bathroom and baggage room basements - namely install a sump pit and sump pump, then excavate trenches around the inside perimeter of the basement, drop some 6" Big-O plastic drain tile into the trenches, and backfill the trenches with crushed stone.  Sort of something like the diagram below.

What we didn't encounter in the other two basements was that extra clay.  In order to get the holes for the drain tile in the steel barrel below the concrete floor in the furnace room basement, we have to excavate that extra 12"-24" of clay.  In addition to working in a soggy mess over several weeks, it would take us a lot of time to dig out all of that extra material.  So I decided to take a different approach.  We would first dig a wide trench from the existing 2" ABS plastic pipe over to our sump pit location and then widen that trenchwork at the location of our sump pit.  We then install the sump pit and sump pump which will then start to de-water the gift shop basement.  In about 10 day, we should be working on some solid ground.

In the meantime, when we return next week, the whole area will be a real soupy mess but it will allow us to get the steel barrel down to its proper level.  By the end of the day, this is what we had accomplished.

It always helps when you have a good crew to do the work and today was no exception.  There was Bill S, Cliff, Brad and Corey.  Just the right numbers when you consider that we are working on stairs that became greasy real fast - that's what you get when you mix clay and water - and we were working in a very closed-in space, to say nothing about the sticky, gooey, pasty, clay.  Bill and I were on the shovels, while Cliff, Brad and Corey alternated on throwing the pails out through the opening and onto the stairs, up the stairs, and out onto the dirt pile.  By the end of the morning, at least one third of the weight kept coming back in as it was impossible to completely empty the pails.

Bill took a few moments to survey the work that we had done. His hand is on the steel barrel that we'll be sinking into that soupy clay next week.  (We'll tell you more about that barrel in our next post as it required some special attention to get it through the opening into this basement.)

This is what it looks like at the drain pipe end.  You can see how fast the trench is filling up with water.  Somewhere against the concrete wall is the drain pipe that we hope will temporarily drain the water out of the basement. 

And then Bill decided to step into the excavation (or rather, I told him to pose for a photo in the excavation.  Naturally, he got stuck in the mud (as anyone would) so Brad had to come to his rescue.  It took two of us to pull him out - that's how sticky, gooey that stuff is.

Next week, we dig the sump ptt, sink the steel barrel, and backfill with crushed stone.  That's gonna be a really messy job, fer shur, fer shur!!