Drainage Again
Those paying exceptionally good attention may recall me mentioning about the swamp-like nature of the back corner of our yard during the wet end to last year.
The water was easily traced over the fence to the small lake at the bottom of the neighbour's yard, which wasn't doing any favours for the fence there either. David raised the issue with them a couple of times, but they insisted it was due to all the wet weather and perfectly normal.
We remained skeptical because there were a few instances where our swamp dried up, only to suddenly reappear in the middle of a dry spell. However having lived here a lot less long than the neighbours, we decided to wait for a longer dry stretch so if it kept happening we'd have something obvious to point at.
With the recent hot weather everything dried up and I kind of forgot about it entirely.
On Thursday someone from Yarra Water arrived at the door to discuss access to our yard to fix our sewage problem.
"Sewage problem?"
Apparently there was great strife upstream which had been traced to tree roots in the pipes around the area of our yard and three other properties that intersect in funny angles down in that back corner.
Inspecting out the back showed that the offending pipe ran exactly through our former swamp, so we feel somewhat vindicated.
One tree was eyed speculatively for destruction, alas not one of the Pittosporrums I want to get rid of so I said we'd prefer to keep it if at all possible. Looks like we will be able to keep it, the neighbours have lost a couple to the chainsaw though.
So Friday workmen rocked up, and solved access problems by knocking down sections of fence between the various yards. They didn't finish, so at the moment we still have a very small earth-mover, a very large pile of dirt, and quite a big hole in the bottom of our yard. They've promised to be back on Monday and leave everything just as they found it - except for the pipe being rerouted slightly further away from trees.
Will be interesting to see what impact this has on our assorted drainage issues. Might save David the effort of digging yet another trench drain down there.
The water was easily traced over the fence to the small lake at the bottom of the neighbour's yard, which wasn't doing any favours for the fence there either. David raised the issue with them a couple of times, but they insisted it was due to all the wet weather and perfectly normal.
We remained skeptical because there were a few instances where our swamp dried up, only to suddenly reappear in the middle of a dry spell. However having lived here a lot less long than the neighbours, we decided to wait for a longer dry stretch so if it kept happening we'd have something obvious to point at.
With the recent hot weather everything dried up and I kind of forgot about it entirely.
On Thursday someone from Yarra Water arrived at the door to discuss access to our yard to fix our sewage problem.
"Sewage problem?"
Apparently there was great strife upstream which had been traced to tree roots in the pipes around the area of our yard and three other properties that intersect in funny angles down in that back corner.
Inspecting out the back showed that the offending pipe ran exactly through our former swamp, so we feel somewhat vindicated.
One tree was eyed speculatively for destruction, alas not one of the Pittosporrums I want to get rid of so I said we'd prefer to keep it if at all possible. Looks like we will be able to keep it, the neighbours have lost a couple to the chainsaw though.
So Friday workmen rocked up, and solved access problems by knocking down sections of fence between the various yards. They didn't finish, so at the moment we still have a very small earth-mover, a very large pile of dirt, and quite a big hole in the bottom of our yard. They've promised to be back on Monday and leave everything just as they found it - except for the pipe being rerouted slightly further away from trees.
Will be interesting to see what impact this has on our assorted drainage issues. Might save David the effort of digging yet another trench drain down there.