Hi,
I’ve mentioned the problems we have had with our back fence several times before. It looks like they might finally be resolved sometime this year. I’ll be telling this tale in three posts so it won’t end up as a single book-length screed, and I’ll spread it out over the space of three months to give the solution to the problem enough time to actually happen. 😊
This first post will cover the history of the problem. The next one will be about my unsuccessful attempts to secure the fences and solve the problem. The third one will (hopefully) be about the resolution of the problem.
The History: We live on the edge of a subdivision. When we moved into our new house in 2011, there was a small forest behind us, a nice little copse of trees stretching from our back fence all the way to the freeway, about 700 feet away (that’s the equivalent of 2 1/3 American football fields, or 6 1/2 European football pitches). A decent sized batch of trees. They helped block our view of a major freeway, and they provided a sound barrier from it too.
A few years later, the sound of heavy machinery pummeled the rear of our house. From one of our second-floor windows, I could see a bulldozer mowing down the trees. After a week or so, they were all gone and a party venue, an RV storage lot, and a fire station were under construction. Roughly a year later, around the spring of 2017, I was mowing our back yard when the wheels of the mower got stuck in a depression next to the fence. I examined the ground and saw that it was caving in along the fence line in a couple of spots. Not badly, but enough to cause several dips in the ground large enough for the mower wheels to get stuck in them.
I went around to the back side of the fence to examine the ground and took some pictures. A paved road, leading to the RV lot, ran between all the houses on our side of the cul-de-sac and the fire station. There was a ditch between our fences and that road, but the ditch was much closer to our fences than it was to the road. Near the road, the ditch was graded at about a 45% angle, and it had a grass/soil padding of about a foot before the drop off started. On our side, the angle of the grade was much steeper, and the slope ended just a few inches from our fences. As I walked along the row, I could see erosion under several of my neighbors’ fences as well. Our back yards were eroding into the ditch.
I started by filling the holes along my fence with some topsoil, but the holes reappeared and kept expanding, plus more holes appeared along the entire fence line over time. The soil I was adding was just sliding into the ditch. I also tried filling the holes with rocks, and then with some concrete. Nothing worked, the ground kept collapsing.
And then the storms came. I’ll cover that in the next post.
See you then,
Michael
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