Hey now! Oh wait, you're one too!
I've been told I am too verbose and tell too many details on many occasions. By other "engineers" in "management" all the time. (Current and past employers.) I know they don't care. I know you don't care.
I try not to talk at that level of detail but I am not always successful.
At the end of the day, DiVinci was correct. He said both "God is in the details." and "The Devil in in the details". In defense of us verbose engineers: if you are annoyed by one please think about this when you are driving across a bridge, relying on a radio to save your life or on the 113th story of a building. I live for those details. Luckily many of us do.
I tell my management that I will try to give them the "Twitter" version when I can. I tend to do the "Facebook" version here on TFP. You are lucky you don't get the "White Paper" version!
Chicago was built on a swamp. It was a major victory for the engineers/architects when they figured out how to build anything higher than a few stories without it sinking.
This is interesting. My mother still lives in Elk Grove Village, IL (and still has the second home in Delavan, WI near you).... I've been trying to move her out here because she is 86 years old. I can't get her to do it even though she's no longer happy with Illinois. She worked until COVID. That is how stubborn she (we) is (are). (I wish she would move so she could have some family around her.) (I also wish she would have moved to Delevan 5-10 years ago and sold EGV). But I digress here.
She said that Schaumburg, IL had a flood watch out from possible interaction with Lake Michigan a couple of days ago. She asked how that could happen. I basically said exactly the same thing as I just quoted from you. Her house there could not have a basement because it would flood. It's on fill and does have several cracks from settling on the fill.
But that swamp went out to the area where I grew up and slightly beyond... that's a good 20-25 miles from the lakeshore.... so it's not only a swamp, it is a massive one at that.
The soil conditions in the SW are actually completely different. It's expansive soil... see this...
Expansive Soil Causes Basement & Foundation Problems
The swamp fill in Chicago actually doesn't present a problem to building something like an in ground pool. My across the street neighbor had an Olympic sized in ground when I was growing up... never really had problems.. I heard that fifty years later the third owner finally had it filled in mainly because they couldn't afford to run it anymore.. but it was still in good shape after 50 years or so.
But here in the Southwest, most houses are built on a slab (it doesn't freeze here enough to make a difference) and those slabs typically are post tensioned to the hold structure so it "floats" on the soil surface. This usually fixes issues in the houses in case you are on expansive soil (all of it is to a certain extent here, but the level of extent [detail] matters). In really bad cases the soil can expand and contract FEET in a season. An inch or two can be compensated by extra reinforcement in the concrete, not FEET though.
So that is what the poster is possibly up against. I don't think it is that bad for him, but I don't have all of the details. The details are important here.
To get a picture in your head, think Bentonite Clay--- Cat litter.... that is what the worst of the expansive clay soils are like. When it's wet it expands a LOT.
And oddly enough.. I am fine at my house. There is TERRIBLE soil about 15 miles away... so it is very localized. I am pretty sure most of Texas is the same or actually worse than Arizona.
One really weird thing about the soil here is that to dig dry, it's like concrete and a small jackhammer works the best. If you can't do that, you can turn it literally to mush (a few inches at a time so it takes days to hand dig a hole here easily) by soaking it with water for 24 hours or so.. It's almost a shock to someone from the Upper Midwest.
www.troublefreepool.com
