Water Feature in Windermere- The Saga continues

We missed a couple of days of blogging. That's because on Thursday morning when we arrived, we discovered that our retaining wall of 4x4's was listing sadly off upright. The previous two days of almost five inches of rain had caused the soil, which is at the edge of a drainage creek, to soften. With the added weight of the water it developed a sag that couldn't be lived with. We determined to build a concrete footer, reinforced with 4x4's and re bar.

The structure that will form the 27,000 lbs. concrete footer.

The 4x4's on each side are dug into the ground 2 ft. and braced on top by 2x4's.

Handling the concrete pouring hose can be tough work because of its weight, but you couldn't tell by the look on this crewman's face.

Construction on the form for our pour began and took all day.
In the end we arrived to put the finishing touches on everything at 6 thirty on Friday morning. The concrete arrived at 7 as planned and we had them pump it over the side wall. It took 27,000 pounds of three thousand PSI fibered concrete. The site looks worse than ever. But as I told the client, if we had built this in dry weather and then had the rains, we might of had the collapse include rocks, plants and a finished project. That would have been a nightmare. This was just a bad dream from which we quickly woke up. We have built berms twice this high for water features and they've withstood hurricanes. But this subsoil was just to loose.

This is the concrete being poured from the truck that has a ten yard capacity into a hopper that then pumps it through the hose.

We felt really lucky to have had our early morning watched over by a Great Horned Owl. He perched in a sycamore tree branch and let us take his picture. We spied a little rabbit coming out of the bushes. That might have been the cause of his arrival.