#Thegreatpoolpondconversion - 191229 and damage report
Sunday looked rainy so we left the tarp on.
It would be the first time we actually dodged real rain.
First we made 54 sandbags and positioned them at the pool.
We took the cover off after that.
Dropped 51 bags around the pool and were about to get in when it started raining.
we panicked, pulled the tarp over, it caught a gust and nearly blew away. then we got it settled and waited.
all of five minutes. checked the radar and figured we could open just two rafters where we needed to work.
so we pulled the tarp sideways and jumped in.
We laid a bunch of bags on the top wall, pounded them flat and then saw some blue sky
Closed the tarp sideways and reopened it the long way. Moved a bunch of rafters, and then…..
Laid the rest of the 51 final bags of the top wall and then measured for level.
There were two low spots which we filled with the remaining three bags and by making them long and thin instead of short and thick.
Now it’s mostly close enough - accuracy doesn’t matter.
And that’s it. The top sandbag wall is done. Again, true to form, no pictures.
That leaves us with one remaining task for this phase - backfilling the top wall. If all goes well, one or maybe two days of work (though no more predicting).
next week we also measure the actual linear contours to estimate the total size of the liner.
After we closed it up we took a walk out the cactus and found this:
could be living in or around there, or just passing through.
And that’s it. That was our Sunday.
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Oh wait, Saturday was damage assessment day!
The weather was a bit better on Saturday. When we pulled the tarps we found this, and it’s not so bad:
so two rafters flipped completely and one fell apart. we righted it, trimmed the ends, screwed it back together and it’ll be just fine.
We were lucky. the new tarp mostly held in place, so a lot of water pooled in it but never hit the sand. We bailed all that thursday night in the rain when we put the tarp back up.
We estimate 5-10 gallons of rain actually got in.
Some spots obviously had water and don’t any longer. hmm - where did it go?
Some sandbags are wet and will never dry.
Luckily, no structural damage at all - to the walls, the pounded sand, etc. Everything held!
What’s likely happened is what happened way back in the beginning when we dumped the first 10 yards of sand into the foot of standing water.
The water percolated through the sand and ‘settled’ at the low point of the pool floor under the sand. This is good cause it all heads for one place.
the first picture is the old ‘deep end’. the second is the shallow.
we bailed the water out:
the shallow side only has about an inch of sand then it’s the pool floor. so that side will bail and dry quickly.
the deep side has about 3 feet of sand to the pool floor, and of course water seeks its own level and travels downhill.
as we bail out the visible water, more water percolates down and trickles into its place. again this is good.
we’ll bail every day until there’s no more surface water. then we will remove some sand from the center of the circle - that’s the deep point.
just like digging a hole at the beach there will be water down there at its new lower level. so we keep bailing and digging.
fortunately there’s no tide to bring more water in.
we have about a month or so to laying the liner, so we just bail every day till we get most of it.
we’ve pulled maybe 4-5 gallons or so already
soggy sand is not so good. Wet sand is fine. It seems stronger and compact. Any water left way down say in the last 6” of sand, well - water doesn’t compress so after the liner is laid and when we start to fill it with water, nothing’s gonna move or collapse. There’s nowhere for it to go. It’ll be about as dense as it could be with tons and tons of water sitting on top of the liner on top of the sand walls.
it seems we’ve done pretty well so far. we hope we remember our physics right, cause we’re not engineers, high school was long ago and this is all guesswork.