Saturated soils?

[NewHorizon's Land]

What do you guys do when you have saturated soils? We excavated a circular patio yesterday and as we began to tamp the soil it was saturated. What do you do about this problem this time of year? We were also approached today about doing 2 walls between two sets of pillars. What problems will come about with these projects?

Thanks
Justin

[zedosix]

We remove as much as possible and add 2" minus. Depending also on what type of soil it is you could add dry portland cement to the affected area. How large of an area is it, also how deep do you have to go til the base is relatively solid?

[NewHorizon's Land]

Zedo, the soil type is more of a loam type. Its not real "sandy" or "clayey". We dug down 9" (6" for base and 3" for pavers and sand). It is 11 feet 6 inch diameter. Do get down to solid base? Not sure. We have been getting a good amount of rain this fall so the ground has been pretty moist. We just got 1.5 inch of snow this week but the ground has not froze.

[Colonial]

We had a job like that about a month ago. We dug it out and it was wet. i would jump on the area and would leave a 5"-6" indent, pretty funny actually. We got lucky and put a torpedo heated near the area and let it run the rest of the day and overnight. next morning we came back and the area was solid as a rock. it is clay soil so dont know if that will work on loam.

[NewHorizon's Land]

Colonial --- Did you tent the area?

[Colonial]

no, it was a small area maybe 10 x10. My fear with the tent was if a leaf or something somehow caught fire and got caught up in it, bye bye canopy. it was a 150,000 btu unit. i do not know if it would work with a smaller unit.

[lawnkid]

We did a wall like that in the spring where the base was all mud from leaking sprinkler lines and it was submersed under 1-8" of water in some areas. We ended up using a trash pump and getting all the water out. Then we dug down another 12" with the mini-ex until all of the mushy mud was out. The total depth of the base alone was 24" in some areas. To stabilize the soil we used a jumping jack and tamped in limestone 1's and 2's until the ground was solid. You can use recycled concrete too. Then we put down our geotextile, compacted 12" of 411 base material in lifts and wrapped the whole base before we laid our base course. Portland will work in some situations but not when your foot sinks in 5-6". You shouldn't have any loam under your base. Dig deeper and see if you can hit a solid clay.