The Grand Canyon, now in Texas

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that we'd uncovered a rather large hole underneath the slabs for the old sheds. We spent most of a morning pulling out roots and digging the trench out all the way to the wellhead to discover the extent of the problem.

First, we dug the hole out all the way back to the wellhead. You can't see it in any of the pictures that I took, but there was actually a small 2ft x 1ft "cavern" underneath the bank on the left.

There was also a fairly sizable cavern around the casing pipe on the well, which is pretty much what we expected. Still, NOT what you want to find!

We got out a flashlight and peered around the casing pipe - we could see down about 6 feet, and keep in mind we were already in a 3 foot hole. At this point our neighbor came over, looked around, and said, "The people at the bottom of that hole are speaking Chinese!"

We spent the next hour pouring rubble and bags of concrete down the hole around the casing, and tamping it in with a piece of rebar. We also filled in the underground cavern on the left, and a little bit of the bottom of the trench close to the well. Fortunately we had a couple of bags of concrete on hand, so we used those up.

The finished product, after cementing and cleaning out all the roots. We affectionately (?) called it "The Grand Canyon" until it was filled in with road base. Hopefully we won't have any more problems with this!

There is actually some good news about all of this - we thought the reason the well didn't work was because the well casing had been compromised, possibly by a tree root. However, the casing looked fine the well casing as far as we could see, so hopefully the well itself is OK in case we ever want to revive it.