The New Driveway is Here!

Thursday afternoon a very long trailer pulled up in front of our property.  I heard the chains clanking and rushed out in time to see a couple of guys pushing my new culvert off the trailer into the ditch.  Wow.  It's huge.  It's probably the correct size - 40' - but it looks so much longer than that.

I was hoping that the crew would arrive Friday morning and they did.  I was just out of bed and dressed when I heard the dog barking and the trucks rumbling.  That was about 8:10.  By the time I grabbed my camera and got out to the front they had already made great progress on tearing up my driveway.

The crew consisted of four guys and it took them about 40 minutes to completely dig up my old rotting culvert.

They used a tripod with a transit and a tall measuring rod to verify the pitch of the ground. About a 2" drop from the high side of the culvert to the low side is what they're after.  Any higher than that and there is a possibility of washout.  Any lower and I'd have very slow drainage and possibly a pond uphill from my culvert.

Moving the culvert from my ditch to the slot that was created in my driveway was pretty cool.  They only had to close the street for a couple of minutes but without the nice big backhoe it would have taken hours.  That culvert was heavy!  And it really was exactly the correct size.

Then they filled in around the culvert.  They used up all the material that was removed from the driveway along with part of a dumptruck load of dirt and cobbles.

  

We had a huge volume of large cobbles wash out from around our culvert back in April. All that material sat in our ditch making a dam to keep rain water ponded at the downhill end of our culvert.  It was attractive enough but now that we are worried about mosquitoes in general and the Zika virus in particular, a stagnant pond is not a good thing.  The guys pulled out all that material and smoothed out our ditch.

My ditches have never looked so good!  I love a man who is really good at using a large heavy and noisy piece of equipment.

They came back in with a load of finer grained dirt and gravel to top dress our driveway.

They picked up the chunks of old culvert and were gone.  The whole thing took 2 hours and 35 minutes.  Impressive.