Holy Cow Tractor Pulling Team

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Yamaha Sold
With spring time here, I put a ad on a local for sale site sponsored by the local NBC station. Oddly enough, a truck driver from South Dakota saw it. He hauled salvage electrical transformers and would be coming though the area. I met him at a truck stop and he took it out for a ride (in the cold rain!) and agreed to buy it. He followed me back to my house where I used the old ramps from my white bus to load it onto his flat bed. We tried to walk beside it and "drive" the bike up the ramp, but the motor stalled. So he, Stacey, and myself pushed it up, until the exhaust bottomed out on the top of the ramp. The driver had a good idea to lift the back of the ramp, which Stacey and I did. That gave of the needed ground clearance, but when tried to push the bike the rest of the way onto the trailer, the other ramp he was standing on slid out off onto the ground, taking him with it. The bike then started to fall on top of him. It is one of those situations where you are helpless. I can't help him, because I am holding the ramp. Somehow, he manages to keep the bike upright. We change tacts, and finally get the bike loaded and strapped down. It is sad to see it go. I put a lot of miles on that bike and really enjoyed it, but I really like my Beemer as well and just don't need two bikes.

Weather Map

I just checked the radar to see if the rain would end. This is what I saw. Now I see why Indiana has been the "target" of so much rain. :-)

Obviously, this is the glitch in the matrix at the NWS, but I still chuckled when I saw it.

Home Projects and Drainage
One of the goals of this season off was to do some projects around the house. The list of projects include building a paragola over the hot tub, putting up skirting on the deck, getting new gutter for the house, repairing some fascia and eaves on the house, painting the house (which is stone, so it is really only the trim), fixing a drainage issue in the garage (the floor slopes away from the garage door, so in the winter, when the snow melts off the cars, we get a big puddle), new outdoor lighting, and a new garage entry door. Nothing is really pressing, like a leak, but just projects we want to do to make the house nicer and better looking, and things that kept getting put of because of tractor pulling. Since they are all outdoor projects, we needed to wait until the weather was warm and relatively dry.

But, before all that could get started, we started having a water problems in the basement. But let me back up before we moved here. The farmer across the street went three seasons and was unable to farm the ground over there because of standing water. There is a county drain tile that runs through out little neighborhood of 6 houses and drains the water from there, as well as the field across the street. Tree roots began invading the tile and it was getting so restricted that is was not adequately draining the water. The farmer asked to get the drain repaired, but several of the neighbors refused because they would have to cut down trees for the county to gain access to the tile. Keep in mind, it is those very trees that are causing the problem, so removal of the trees is a permanent solution for the problem, first by allowing a new tile to be installed, and second, by removing the source of the roots that caused the problem in the first place. But, that repair never happened. The previous owner of my house cooperated with the farmer, but the tile isn't directly on my yard, so his cooperation was fruitless.

The farmer installed a private tile to drain his three fields into a private ditch and which flows into a public ditch, a ditch I pay taxes to maintain, and a ditch I presently do no have access to due to the plugged drain.

At this point, we bought the house, in '96. We have a finished basement, so water could be very destructive down there. Over the course of the next 10 years, we had four floods. Three of them were due to pump failures and the fourth, the water simply was coming in fast than it could be pumped out. Luckily, the water never got very deep and we didn't suffer any real damage to the house, mostly because we noticed the problems right away. Each time, I tried to fix the problem, new pump, better pump, bigger pump, second battery powered pump. Last spring, it became obvious that the pump was just a symptom, and not the problem. There is a black plastic pipe that comes out of the wall. Where it goes, I do not know, but I suspect it ties into the plugged public drain tile. So, I knocked a hole in the foundation and ran a 2" outlet outside, above grade. That solved the problem of getting the water out of the sump, but created a new problem. The water was going outside the house, soaking into the ground, seeping back into the perimeter drain, and running back into the sump. So, now we are simply pumping the same water out over and over.

Back on April 14th, we had a weekend of very bad storms, lots of rain, big hail, and tornadoes. During that storm, something new started, we actually had water seeping through the walls. We also had a tremendous amount of water standing on the leach field of our septic system, and were concerned that we would start having sewage problems as well. I bought a 100' drainage tile, as a temporary measure, and took the sump pump outlet as far as a could from the house, in an effort to prevent the output water from seeping back into the pump. I then called an excavator, the county drainage board, and the county surveyor. We needed to do something and the time to make plans was now.

We received a call from our neighbor asking us to move the pipe (which we did). They never asked us what the problem was or what we were doing to remedy it. Obviously, we already had plans in motion, but they never gave us to opportunity to present our side of the story. Shortly thereafter, we received a letter from UAW legal services. They threatened a lawsuit if we didn't move the pipe. We talked with the lawyer, but he refused to talk with us about the situation. So, we are just waiting to be served with a summons to go to court. There is really nothing I can do with the pipe, until the house is fixed. The funny thing, is this is one of the neighbors refusing to allow the county tile to be fixed, and now he is complaining about standing water in his yard. Our sump pump is the "obvious" source of the problem, and he feels by making us move the pipe, his yard will dry up, but it won't. There is approximately 8 acres of land that drain through his yard, and we only contribute about .8 (or 10% for the numerically challenged) of the water. And, of our .8 acres, only a portion of that water actual flows through our perimeter drains and our sump, the rest drains into the side ditches, or flows naturally downhill across our yard into his.

So, after surveying the my property, we find a drain tile across the road. We find that it is a private tile owned by the farmer I spoke of earlier, but have not yet met. So, I call the farmer and explain the situation and he is truly sympathetic to my problems, especially since the previous owner was also cooperative. He contacts the owner of the field and we receive permission to connect to the tile. So, the plan is this, to encircle the house with a new perimeter drain that connects to that tile, and they tie in the output of the sump pumps and all of our gutter downspouts into that drain as well. This will remove nearly all of the water from the immediate area around the house, and significantly decrease the amount of water flowing through our sump pump.

Last Wednesday, was permit day. You always hear horror stories of obtaining the proper permits, but I must say it was a truly simple and pleasent experience. The first permit was a road-cut permit, required to dig up the road to get the tile across the road. I noticed a big orange "P" in the road, the the county engineer confirmed, the road is schedule for repaving next week. He is trying to get the road crew to pave that road last, but we are in a race. Currently we are in the lead, but we will see how that plays out. Anyway, they had the permit waiting, and that hurdle had been crossed. The next place we went was the health department. Since we need to dig near the septic tank and leach field, we didn't know if we needed a permit for that. It turns out we didn't, but again they were very help in furnishing blue prints of our existing system. I knew generally where it was, but now I know for sure. The excavator needs to have the underground utilities located himself for liability reasons, but that doesn't take long.

We cut down a tree that was in the way, and moved the landscaping and sections of the fence. We are ready to go. At about 3:00 PM on Wednesday, it started raining, as really hasn't stopped. So, the excavator can't set started, but neither can the paving crews. Each day of rain should cause a day slip, and hopefully, we can stay ahead in the race.

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