A New Addition to the Family plus the Great Sinkhole.
A New Addition to the Family plus the Great Sinkhole.
New Addition
Looking back over my sparse writing since the beginning of the year, for which I apologise (for the sparse additions to the blog writing not for looking back over it), I noticed I hadn’t made mention of the most significant addition to our family, that being the birth of Heather and my first grandchild, a little girl. Our granddaughter (for privacy reasons for all concerned I will call “little Em”) came into the world back in January this year and is the most gorgeous little thing (I’m not biased in any possible way). “little Em” has attitude already and over the past couple of months as she has giggled, coo’ed and pooed herself into our lives we can only reflect on that when the life works out right, good things happen for and to good people and our daughter is (and the rest of our family are) most definitely good people. Both Heather and I are looking forward to “little Em’s” trip along the dash.
The Great Sinkhole
Around Em Nau farm over the past couple of months we have had a couple of good falls of rain that have helped fill the dams and green up the paddocks.
In January we had 239mm (100mm around Australia day), February we had 415mm (350mm from 20-22 Feb) and so far this month we have had85mm.
Although this rain is good for refilling dams etc it has the
down side of causing erosion on the driveway (which I have written about
before) and, as we discovered on the weekend, it also erodes subsoil
areas. On Saturday Heather and I were
looking over the paddocks when we noticed a hollow adjacent the driveway, that
has been there for a while had seemed to sunk more. I went and planted my size 9 boot in the
centre of it and broke the thin crust of top soil to reveal a hole that went
down about a metre. 
It was caused by a broken/split pipe that had somehow become
offset between two joints. From the look
of the pipe when I excavated the hole it must have become dislodged when the
first laid the pipe back in 19nickty-nick and the subsequent rain over the past
20 odd years had eroded around the pipe.
There was evidence that there had been attempted repairs over the years by refilling the hole with road base, but of course this too was washed away as the hole got progressively bigger with each substantial rain period.
Without major excavations and expense the best we could do was to also attempt running repairs which consisted of exposing both ends of the join, build a bridging joint between the two ends and backfill with road base and top soil. Time will tell if we managed to stem the erosion but at least we won’t lose a vehicle of visitor down the hole in the foreseeable future.In : Farm life
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