Walls come tumbling down II

No, this isn't a re-post. The unrelenting cold this winter provided us more work than expected. The frost line was deeper than I can remember. When temps rose and began to thaw out most of the ground, we were hit with another deep freeze. This caused the saturated ground to refreeze and expand pushing against this wall.

The funny part was my assistant Josh had just left this area an hour before and all was fine. As I walked through, I just lowered and shook my head. I went back to the shop to let him know what happened and he just looked at me with a blank stare. He actually thought I was messing with him.

After moving all the stones away the two crewmen began rebuilding the wall. We removed about a foot of earth behind the wall to incorporate drain stones and perforated pipe. This will allow water to flow away from the wall as well as provide room for expansion.

Cruel, Cruel Winter

The winter of 2015 never seemed to end. As I write this I'm still getting reports of courses around the area that received significant winter damage. Many suffered from Winter kill that left huge swaths of dead grass and numerous irrigation issues. One such story was a local course that sustained damage to over 90 irrigation heads. The issue was that when the ground heaved from the deep freeze/thaw,  it would put tremendous pressure on the swing joints below. A swing joint is a product that has movable gasketed elbows which allows the technician to raise or lower heads to the proper height. As the ground lifted the head, the swing joint, which is attached to pipe 2 feet underground wasn't budging and the elbow/ threads would snap off. At this point we have repaired 8 heads with more to go. Compared to 90 we got off lucky!