<b>Caveats and Solitary Mutterings</b>
I must caution everyone that besides being so obviously counter-intuitive (no one believed I could connect such a flimsy tube to a hydrant), these systems really do require some different thinking in their placement and use. To simply try to follow these photos without additional instructions or understanding of the techniques is to invite remarkable frustration and disaster. Very early on, the systems proved that they would teach me, and I learned many eccentricities of the operations under rather humbling circumstances. Covered with mud, I've rolled down hills--with the sausages in heavy pursuit like a string of hot dogs. I did this one night in the full view of a thousand high-rise windows in downtown Chicago and someone with a camera could have blackmailed me forever. I'll produce a little book on it all, but the systems, in spite of their pugnacity, are simple, inexpensive and practical--my favorite kinds of inventions.
Please also remember that if I set my own design goals, I have an internal obligation to meet them--that's part of the craft and responsibility of being innovative. If I wasn't bright in some consideration, I had to rethink or abandon that inadequate element or concept in order to get back to my supposed "efficient and practical finished design". That passion however is not packaged with my design; it stays with me like velcro--and you'll have to develop your own.
Because the sausages are so counter-intuitive, along with anything new being automatically subject to nay-saying and negativism, some users could not get past their initial awkwardness, skepticism, and subsequent frustrations. I can't control how people read these explanations, the best I can do is to write as clearly and carefully as possible. And I've learned I am even more impotent in getting people to believe in something they don't want to believe in at that moment.
During our crisis, I came across an abandoned sausage wrapped around a tree in a park. I have the photos somewhere, and those pictures are truly worth a thousand words, but this tree was about 2 feet in diameter and the surrounding deflated sausage was about 3 feet in diameter. It was so tightly wrapped around the trunk that the tubing sat perched on the buttress roots and was held about 4 inches from the ground in some spots.
I know the man who placed it there will explain to his dying day about how stupid this idea was and how stupid I must be! He's absolutely right. What I found in that park was profoundly stupid given my goal of saving trees. What's wrong is this was never my intention or solution. How did he install it so badly? Why wasn't the circle from sidewalk to curb with the tree in the middle? Beats me. I'm just a designer, not a behavioral psychologist.
<b>The Author Has Returned to the Building...</b>
Getting back to the story, the public accepted the concepts instantly with the agencies taking a bit longer, but in a very short time we were using the sausages throughout the our area. It was exempted from the watering bans and despite the apparent fragility of the system, there was no vandalism, almost as if everyone understood the tasks and then agreed to leave the tubes alone in their work.
The public was delighted. There were elements of whimsy like the two little girls writing in the surface condensate from the cold water flow beneath and there was a continuing sense of performance art like Christo's umbrellas and fences. Water bubbles would glide silently along, rising at the little hills, and slowly disappearing in the valleys beyond.
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The last photo in this section is the recharging of one of my drought-proof parks during a droughty time a few years ago. The park was designed to have no maintenance or irrigation for its trees and landscapes and I have had to intervene only two times in 8 years by running a sausage from a hydrant over to one of the park catch basins in order to recharge the underground storage. The photo shows the hydrant open full with the left tube discharging onto a basin cover and the right tube running off to irrigate some shrubbery and flowers while I passed the time during recharging.
Near the center of the photo is a park neighbor with her son who were enjoying the show and wanted their picture taken. Next to them is a clock I used to keep track of time spent in the intervention. I stayed there about an hour and a half that afternoon and didn't return for two years when prudence and a number of rainless weeks suggested that I revisit my green friends. Since the park had reached its storage equilibriums, the inspection ports showed everything was wet and happy--and I wandered away with the vague feeling of a father just told by his kids that he's not needed anymore.
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What Does This Have To Do With Subsidence?
We had a drought crisis there in Chicago that I attempted to answer with rehydration by flooding trees to a depth of 5 or 6 inches. We drowned no trees that we could determine, and the control trees left uncorrected either disappeared or were removed over the next five years, which was in keeping with anecdotal expectations that trees stressed by drought will decline and succumb to other adversities. The dehydration that our trees faced was a short term one with the drought breaking in a few months, but the effects of that catastrophe were significant and unarguable.
This relatively short event did not seriously alter the general rhythm of the lower level of the soils in my opinion. I did pursue the footprint of the flooded circles at the line of the tubing dam down to depths of 3 to 6 feet and found a remarkably straight vertical line of demarcation between moist and desiccated soils. Our landscapes were dotted with trees still standing in the middle of green circles surrounded by dead grass weeks after we made our single watering at those trees. It was my assumption that the "unnatural" state of standing water with a head pressure of 5 or 6 inches was a new dynamic that "accelerated" and then "defined" the straight downward movement of the ponded water--that water did not spread out as usual since it was confined by the dam above as compared to amorphously spread by sprinklers or rain.
In the UK, your droughts are protracted and memorialized by a 20% reduction in average rainfall. The rhythm of the soils is clearly affected and the replenishment of the upper horizons has been denied in the long term by your new climatic changes. The lower clay soils, no longer wetted from above and slow moving in moisture relocation, have begun to redistribute their remaining water in an upward fashion to counter that new gradient and to attempt to settle in a new mechanical equilibrium.
Illustrated again by the second drawing, shrinkage simply is the change of moisture from the fatter clay sandwich to the thinner one. In their aggregate and proportion, the soils no longer provide the "established" supportive structural capacity and the constructions resting above are left to their own devices. This generic clay collapse has, and will continue to expose now inadequate building practices that were once traditional and appropriate for usual conditions. We simply did not include any foresight for our new climates. As I stated before, there are many contributors to structural damage via shrinkage, but the droughts with their corresponding diminishing dynamics of your soils are the base cause.
Continues in the next post.....
