The Culvert

Back in ‘64 my Dad got tired of driving through the
neighbors’ yards and across fields that were only questionably
passable.  There is a legal
requirement for landowners to provide a road right-of-way on section lines and
Dad petitioned the township to build a road down the section line to our
property from the Onigum Road.  And what was eventually to become 80th
St NW was born.  The only problem
was that it ended at our property line on the edge of about 150 yards of swamp
with seasonal standing water.  So
the road project commenced.  Our old
3-ton dump truck could haul about 3 yards of fill and the road took several
hundred loads.  It seemed like the
first hundred just sank out of sight. Some fill came from the north 40 acres
and some came from our gravel pit west of Akeley.  (As an aside, The Ah-Gwah-Ching cutoff in those days was not maintained and it was worth
our fixing it up to save the 5 extra miles and hassle of driving through Walker
with truckloads of dirt. Pretty soon everyone from Akeley who worked at “the
San” was happily taking the shortcut. )  It took all summer for our swamp road to
become passable and another several iterations to bring
it up to Dad’s standards.  At
the deepest part of the swamp—about 100 yards wide—the fill is a
little over 6 feet high and it varies from 25 to 35 feet wide at its base.  Two cars can comfortably meet anywhere
along the top.

The landform drains south-to-north and we put in a culvert
to provide flow-through.  Over the
years the road sank a little and was topped several more times and with snow
plowing and inexpert smoothing has spread out to cover the ends of the
culvert.  So the water doesn’t
drain so well.  That wasn’t
much of an issue for several years, but this year had record snowfall and melt
plus a lot of spring rain and as of 3 June the water on the south side had
risen more than halfway up the height fill.

This much water dammed up will cause problems
eventually—from road washouts to tree kills—and needs to be
relieved.  The urgency for right now
was because there is a grassy cutoff lane to where Jake and Leah want to park
wedding guests and it is mushy enough to be impassible due to the unusually
high water level.  So this weekend
(4-5 June) Jake and Ed undertook to “clear out the culvert.”  Ed thought he knew where it was and
reinforced this impression with a rented metal detector.  After a Saturday morning
adventure (debacle) with a
rented generator, sump pump and pressure washer, it was determined that any
effort to clear the culvert with a water jet would require that we first locate
said culvert.  Time
for plan B.

Jake and Ed rented a Kubota backhoe Saturday afternoon:
“24 hours on the clock and 8 hours on the meter, please.”  First they went down to the beaver pond
and found the old culvert that was installed there. No longer
in use and a bit rusty and half full of silt, but basically 20 feet of pretty
sound 12 inch steel pipe.  So
the Kubota teetered across the old beaver dam to dig out the culvert and then
drag it out about 200 yards to load it on a trailer.  Then the fun started.

Jake surveyed the most likely spot for a new
culvert—deep (high fill) on both sides and relatively narrow, but still
25 feet wide.  It took about two
hours on the Kubota meter (and a couple years off our lives) to dig the full
channel.  What started out to be a
minimal (??) trench 6 feet wide by 5 feet deep took a bad turn when  the backhoe found a large (and very
solid after 45” years) tree stump about 4 feet below the road surface and
everything had to move over.  So the
final trench was about 7 feet wide at the bottom and 10 feet wide at the top, 5
feet deep, and 25 feet long.  That
comes to about 5 yards of fill moved to create a raging river 3 feet deep and 8
feet wide.  We let it drain
overnight Saturday and by measuring the marks on the trees Sunday morning it
looks like the water level dropped between 25 and 30 inches.  The water level in the south side is
very manageable now and it smells like a sewer overflowed from all the exposed
swamp muck.

Sunday morning we cleaned the silt out of the recycled
culvert and installed it at the bottom of the trench.  Given the culvert’s age pushing
50, Jake and Ed also did some extra creative construction to build a protective
vault from old reclaimed sidewalk squares (thanks, Sam) and filled in the
trench over it.  Ed will have some
cosmetic road work to do next weekend but the big challenge is behind us and we
should be in good shape for drainage for another 50 years or so.

Here are a few captioned snapshots of the whole
process.  This first one shows part
of the road fill from the shallow end.
Here are the ingredients to makeshift culvert vault covers.

Here are the Kubota backhoe and the reclaimed culvert.  The fill is about 5 feet high at this
point.

And a couple shots of THE MAN digging.  The fill is 6 feet high here and you can
see the lake behind him.  Guys if
you can come up with ANY excuse to get hold of one of these, grab it.  It sounds pricey at almost $300 for 24
hours but you can get a lot done – and damn it’s
fun!

After less than an hour the water level had dropped nearly
20 inches, as can be seen by the high water marks on the trees.

It pays to have the right equipment.  The Kubota is snazzy but the Massey will
be staying home with us when the party is over.

And the finished job is inspected and approved!

Do they make these things in pink??