"Love That Dirty Water" - Building the Winery: Part 5

You put the words: "For Public Consumption" in front of any endeavor and automatically someone in the regulatory system recognizes that "whatever goes in must come out". Hence a septic system that resembles a 7 silo rocket launching facility. Unlike private residential septic systems where the homeowner can quietly cover up the access panels with a few inches of dirt and sod, a system such as this requires geo-engineers to design a system that includes three huge concrete tanks and seven manholes (all visible to the tourists we hope to cater to), 2 control panels and multiple pumps, one of which is intended to grind up solids before transport up hundreds of feet of discharge piping to a drain field. I think it is intended for that occasional use by three busloads of retirees, all of whom have "issues" and need the trip to a winery to use their rest rooms. Geez.

Any way, the area in front of the new building was dug out to allow the tanks to be dropped into place. As I mentioned in a prior blog, this needed to be done before the seasonal rains came in. If the backhoe went down and broke through the water table such that water pours in faster than the hoe could remove dirt, then these concrete tanks, as heavy as they are, would begin to float in place, much like an aircraft carrier. Not a great way to place and locate them in position so they could be tied together.

The contractor completed his work in about a week, grading the area around the "silos" as best he could, but recognizing the final grading and landscape work would be done months later. Shy of testing the system (of course, it needed to be tested), he felt he was done. That is until I looked over from a distance and said "No way".  The black silos were almost 2 feet out of the ground; about as ugly as it could be designed. Apparently the engineers that came up with this system didn't consult with an exterior landscape designer or have any understanding of aesthetics. But I'm sure it was operable!

The testing was scheduled for a few days later. So here were all these guys standing around. A couple of electricians to temporarily wire up the controls, another two guys who installed the system(who had a personal interest in getting paid), the G.C. and his son, the system designer, and me. Everyone kinda just stood there looking at each other until I decided I was going to be the first one to ask the first dumb question. Once that got out of the way, questions flew in all directions among these contractors, who up to that point just did their job without understanding the bigger picture of an operating system. I also voiced my displeasure with the height of the 2 black manholes; the contractor quickly got on it and removed 12" from each. The tests then got underway.

Garden hoses were run from my house to fill the concrete tanks. When the power was made available from a portable generator, the pumps were then started. There are two of them: one to grind the solids and another to send the pulverized waste up a slight incline into the discharge field maybe 200' away. The designer had certain specifications he was measuring against, and this was basically the number of gallons that could be moved in a specific time period. If it was too fast or too slow, the controls had to be tweaked for adjustment. If you removed a lid and looked inside of one of these silos, you'd see float valves and even more electronics controlling the movement of  excretions. Even our personal discharge has gone high tech. Ugh. Really, is this necessary ?

But when it was all said and done, regardless of how efficient the process is or the value it silently adds to the operation, the fact remains that is an eyesore. We are open to ideas, but our latest is to border the front lawn with boxwoods and then plant pachysandra all around the silos such that they will eventually cover them up. Or we could build tables over them and use them as footstools for a front cafe area (no, I'm kidding !)

Nothing But Hot Air

With all the hot air I've been hearing, it's nice to see some of it put to good use.

I tend to wake up pretty early in the morning, and when I do I work my way through breakfast, brew a pot of coffee, and then move myself up to my office located in the turret room on the second floor of the house. It is still black as night then, especially now that we have screwed around with the clocks. I start up the computer and go through my morning ritual by checking in on my favorite news outlet to see if any scandals have surfaced overnight or to see what the day's news cycle is going to repeat over and over again. I answer my emails, or generate some. Pay some bills, start making a list of stuff I have to buy to continue on some of the many projects I am juggling to get done. I tend to be fairly deep in thought doing all this.

 Let's face it, no one is bothering me. It is quiet at that time. Employees aren't due to arrive for another few hours. My mind is busy.

And then I hear this buzz.Without being conscious of it, the sun has popped above the horizon and started to show some light. So I look out the window and I see that there is a balloon crew setting up on my front lawn. The balloon is completely unfurled and the chase car is pointing towards the bottom of the opening; on the front of which is this huge fan blowing air into the balloon. On occasion Mark, the owner of "Balloon Explorer" (was Virginia Balloons) would go over and give the balloon a quick zap of flame from his propane tank. There is continual straightening of lines, more flames to heat up the internal air, and a gradual lifting of the balloon until it becomes fully vertical.

Today he is giving two female passengers a ride. Must be a bucket list item for them, for they are officers at a local naval base and one of them will be retiring from duty soon.

Things happen quickly now. The three of them jump in the basket. A balloon this size tends to move with the slightest wisp of air. They are nearly impossible to control while still being on the ground; it is best to get them airborne and then only be concerned with the 3 mph breeze pushing them in a southwesterly direction. Height is easily adjusted by those quick bursts of flame that the pilot commands.

I get those "happy waves" from the new adventurers. They have learned my name and, in unison they yell out "Bye Dave". I have seen it many times before, so I give them a quick wave as they rise above my house and get pushed by the wind. The chase car driver picks up any loose items that have been left behind and then comes over and thanks me. He tells me the intended route, about 15 miles towards either Wakefield or Waverly, depending on the winds aloft of course.

But Mark, whom I have known for years, takes a.moment in his flight duties to snap a picture of the winery we are building.  From his vantage point it certainly is a unique perspective. And a nice way to start the day.

The Building Pad: Building the Winery Part 4

The basic process for putting in a building pad is to first scrape off the topsoil, going down maybe 12 to 18", grading the area, and then back-filling with a compact-able sand soil mix. Seems simple enough. So the contractor who had put in our service road (see prior blog entry) proceeded to drive the blade of his bull dozer into the earth and push dirt out of the way.

The corners of the building were staked out with those little tiny red plastic flags. They were like the ones you see when someone surrounds their property warning they just put up Electric Fence for their dog. Nothing really sophisticated about it, other than we had a surveyor come in and verify their location. I wanted the building to run parallel with the roadway we just had put in, which runs in a perfect east to west direction. It'll mean our front door will aim true north, and the rear of the building will face true south, which will be ideal for when we eventually install solar panels on the back roof.

A good machine operator can get the dug out plane to within an inch or so in variance over the 5000 square foot area, an accomplishment only achieved through years of practice and a drive towards perfection. He didn't need all the new fangled monitoring devices found in the newer dozers......he could tell how he was doing by the "feel" of his treads as he slowly moved back and forth. And if there was a mushy area he felt that too, as his 18 ton machine dipped ever so slightly while moving from one end to the other.

As with many contracts and quotes, there is the always present escape clause or fine print that a contractor uses to resolve unforeseen things, and not really knowing what one will find below the surface of the soil is reason to have wording that covers the contractor if a surprise is found while excavating. Wouldn't ya know it that after he dug out the required depth, a quick walk around on the newly graded surface inspecting suspect areas pointed to a major problem which he quickly shared with me.

There was this one area, maybe 20' x 50', that felt like you were walking on a trampoline. The ground, seemingly hard on the surface, floated under your feet as you walked on it.So a person of less than 200 pounds made the ground seem wishy-washy. This wouldn't bode well if you poured a slab on top of it and then added a building on top of that. Though the slab might hold true, eventually it would crack under the weight stress and then cause a nightmare in the integrity of the the structure.

The apparent cause for this is that soil has a skeletal structure, with pores filled with air or water. Normally this isn't a big deal, however when something of massive weight is put on it this honeycomb structure is compromised and collapsed. It is best to have a solid base to work on and not depend on the massive weight of a building to be uniformly dispersed throughout the footprint. The mushiness we felt was the sponge-like nature of our soils, where my weight was just moving the water around that was within these pores. There are two real choices one can choose from to resolve this new found problem. One is to wait it out and let the water table drop, and then compact the region and put in some additional fill. That wasn't likely to happen since we are entering our wet season here and the soil wasn't going to dry out any time soon. The other option is to dig it out and hopefully we can find the extremes of this soft spot, get out all of the weak earth, and then back fill once again. We had to go with option #2.

But this required bringing in the excavator, for the bulldozer is not meant to remove specific chunks of earth out. So the next day the contractor brought in another massive machine (same one he used on clearing the edge of the pond) and proceeded to dig down until he hit solid ground. When he was done digging, much like a dentist performing a cavity removal in a rear molar, he had made a mound of dirt 3 stories high. He had successfully identified the weak spot and removed all the weak soil that was doing the shifting. It was now time to back fill, and back fill, and then still more back filling.

When the project was "finished", 38 dump trucks of fill were brought in, along with another 27 dump trailers of sandy fill. To put this another way, a dump truck holds about 20,000 pounds of fill, which at about a ton a cubic yard comes to about 10 yards of material. The dump trailer each holds about triple this, or 30 tons of fill. Certainly makes you want to reconsider suddenly jumping in front of one of these vehicles on the highway ! So all in all we had 1190 tons of fill put into our front roadway and building pad. This equals over 2 million pounds of fill that would equate to having a 9" layer of sand put on an acre of land.

We are now ready to go onto Part 5 of Winery Building, installing the septic system. This is needed to be done sooner than later in order to jump ahead of the rainy season and to know where drains need to be roughed in before we pour the concrete foundation. We must hurry; it is the middle of October.