Helter Shelter
If your brown-leafed trees, wilted bushes and dead grass have been troubling your thoughts, it might be best for you to go to your thoughtful spot right now and pour yourself a refreshing cold beverage. Here’s why: a drought like the one we’re having now can break your house.
I know. It sounds crazy, but I’m not making this up. Given enough scorching-hot, rain-free days, the soil around your house can shrink away from your foundation and leave the foundation walls without enough dirt to hold them up straight. It gets worse: when the rains finally come, the soil around your house will expand. If there’s enough rain—like there might be during hurricane season—your faithful dirt might just turn on you and start pushing your foundation walls inward and upward. Next thing you know, you’ve got cracks in your walls, your windows and doors won’t open or close without a struggle and your front steps are all cracked and shifted.
There’s more: if the shrink-swell cycle is severe enough, the dirt could shift enough to break the water pipes that run in and out of your house. You could have water spurting out of the supply pipe in the front yard and sewage seeping out of the drain in the back.
It’s probably too late to try to head off these plagues now. The best we can do is petition the heavens for many days of gentle rain.
There is a bright spot among all these drought worries, at least an anecdotal one. In the 20 or so years that I’ve inspected houses—about 5,000 of them—only one customer called and told me that his house broke because of drought. Lucky for him, it was just his porch. But fixing it did cost him about $10,000.
Of course, there’s a pretty good chance that lots of my customers got drought-induced foundation cracks and broken pipes but didn’t call me because they knew there wasn’t a dang thing I could do about it. If I were perspicacious enough to see droughts and floods coming, I’d just move to Vegas and earn myself some real money.
There is a cure—or at least a palliative—for drought-induced house damage. Sometime between now and the next king-hell drought, get yourself some soaker houses. You want enough to reach all the way around your foundation walls. Place them about eight to 18 inches away from the walls. When the next drought comes and the dirt gets dry, turn on the soaker hoses and keep the soil around your house damp. You want uniform wetness, so don’t just water the front yard and let the back yard go brown.
These problems and solutions apply not only to foundation walls—such as concrete block, poured concrete or stone walls—they also apply to concrete slab foundations. Shrinking and expanding soil can break a slab just as easily as it can break a foundation wall.
If you’re thinking about buying a new house or having a new house built, you’d be wise to ask your builder to install a simple foundation irrigation system while he’s got the foundation trench open. It’ll add some extra cost but could save you plenty in repair bills a few years down the road.
Another thing about buying or building a new house: before you sign the purchase agreement, hire your very own soil engineer to check the site, the foundation trenches and the soils. Pardon my cynicism, but it’s just crazy to rely on the builder’s engineer or the local codes inspector to find any problems, let alone admit to the existence of problems. Like all sales folks, they’re selling what they’ve got in stock. Believe me when I tell you: their inventory does not include much science or attention to detail. It’s not at all unusual for a foundation trench to be a mess, full of soil cut and hauled in from some other part of the development and not properly compacted. Soil that’s not properly compacted will shift later and break your house just like a drought can.
It’s common for the foundation walls—which are usually buried before the prospective buyer sees them—to lack proper damp- and water-proofing. And then there’s the scrap lumber, the cigarette packs, the construction debris and such that shouldn’t be in the trench but are. The local codes inspectors are supposed to keep all these mistakes from happening, but usually they don’t. Simply put, foundation trenches aren’t made by engineers, architects or skilled craftsmen. They’re made by semi-skilled, unscientific guys who hurry around on pint-sized earthmovers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Finally, consider this: if you live in a place where, during a drought, the city fathers and mothers mandate that you limit your water use to drinking, bathing and cooking during certain hours, I say you should go ahead and ignore those mandates. If you water nothing else during a drought, water your foundation. If you have to pay a fine, pay it. It’ll be a whole lot cheaper than fixing a broken house.
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