Church with a broken and sinking foundation in Concord, DE - Part 1 of 3

  Recently, DryZone was contracted to fix a failing foundation in a church just outside of Seaford, DE in a town called Concord. Our inspector looked at old architectural drawings of a rebuild that was done around 20 years ago. What he saw was a large concrete shelf added under a corner of the church to add some support. The drawing made it look around 10 feet in length, so it wouldn’t be hard to remove with excavators and jack hammers in order to get the helical piers in the ground. If the crew could get the helical piers in the ground, the thought was that they could get this church supported and fix the problem they had for decades.

Surprises from the start…

  When we start any foundation piering job, the holes are typically dug by hand until we are certain there are no unmarked underground pipes. It came as a surprise when the crew started digging and hit concrete about 4 inches down. They knew that there was a crawlspace under the church, so the concrete footer should have been much farther down.  They continued to dig a few feet down and the concrete didn’t stop. Eventually they decided that this must have been done when the rebuild was completed somewhere in the 1980’s. It was fairly typical of contractors to do something other than what the plans called for. Since they expected to do a little extra anyway, they figured that the job hadn’t gotten changed that much. The procedure is to drill down in a “dotted line” fashion. This helps to break off the concrete chunks in manageable pieces. They drilled holes and noticed that a 16 inch drill bit wasn’t long enough. Just to let you know, a normal concrete footer should be about 8 inches deep and 18 inches across. This means that the added concrete was more than twice as thick as it should have been. Cutting through concrete this thick is no easy task. It was then that the crew knew that they would be on this job for quite a while.

Stay tuned for the continuation of this story…