On the 21st and 22nd of July we had some very heavy rain, in 36 hours 177 mils fell out of the sky. For that whole time it was so heavy that I knew it would cause some damage. When it finally stopped I took the bike for a ride to scope out just how much havoc the rain had caused. Lower down the hill where the creeks have a lot of water flowing down them was where the most damage was going to be.
In our QE2 covenanted block there is a culvert that had been blocked up with the gravel and plant matter that had been washed down the gully. This caused the force of water to wash down our driveway and first fill up the dip in the track with gravel that was meant to divert the water over the edge and back down into the creek. Once this dip was full the water carried on down our drive and just blew it out with its force.
In places the hole in the ground was three meters deep. This meant that I could not drive in or out until the track was fixed. I was stuck in and my wife Janice was stuck out for six days before I could get a digger up to start fixing things. I was lucky enough to get Gary Oliver from Winchester to come up with his 12 ton digger to start this big job. Gary was quick to get the track open so that we could drive in and out then next we needed to work on the culvert that blew out.
Rather than just clear these culvert pipes I wanted to get a bigger pipe that won’t block up again in a hurry. In the ten years that we have owned this block of land this is the second time that it has blocked up. The first time there was one culvert pipe about 400mm wide that had blocked up so I had put an extra five 300mm culvert pipes above this hopping that it would not blow out again.
Obviously I had to take all of these pipes out and put in one large pipe. It is only when you need a culvert pipe that you find out just how dear they are. The cheapest large pipe I could get was 800mm wide and 6 meters long and it cost just over $1000. At least now it should not block up.
The 400mm concrete pipe that we took out we put into the pig block as the culvert that was there had also blocked up. Once the culverts were fixed Gary got to work on getting the track back to an even better state than it was before. Down at our gateway needed a lot of work to make it better and more open.
I am rapt with the end job as Gary in four days has got our track looking heaps better. At the end of the job I towed a pallet up and down the track behind my motorbike leaving a nice smooth finish.
Thanks Gary for a great job.
