"Perk" Test

He he... Perk test huh   

Sorry itchi, I couldn't resist. Ive been good all day and I saw a perk test thread... and well.......................................  

Today with mound septic systems.......you can put them over almost any soils. I do not care how the soil perks, 20 plus inches of rain is not something man can design cities to handle......they would go bankrupt in the process....chit happens.

Yea if all this happened with a six inch rain......get the ropes and find some trees, but 20 inches plus......get a boat.

I live way north of Milton and because of all the clay up here I had to put in a drain field over 3 times the normal size...I wonder why some places in Pensacola are draining so slowly ?

Are you suggesting any soil in the world would perk 20 plus inches of rain in 24 hours?.......I think I saw that soil in a Tarzan movie.....it was called quick sand.

Some areas should never have been been developed..

It took this flood for you to figure that out? I take one look at Santa Rosa Island and I figured that out over 40 years ago.

2seaoat wrote:Some areas should never have been been developed..

It took this flood for you to figure that out?   I take one look at Santa Rosa Island and I figured that out over 40 years ago.

Maybe you should have told your neighbors about your assessment of their properties

My beloved neighbor who I would sit and drink beer and talk about the world was a pilot who had enough after Ivan and has moved to NC. My other neighbor is trying to sell his house and plans to move to a lake in KY. Both of them shared one common denominator......they simply had gotten too old to deal with the chit, and the risk that more was coming. Both had four feet of water with Ivan, and less with Dennis, but enough to turn them sour on the realities that a great place to visit for a couple weeks or months may not be a place for an older person to spend his final years when they are frail and vulnerable.

Maybe you should have told your neighbors about your assessment of their properties

They retired on a bayou, had boats and loved fishing......when the I-10 bridge went down they had five feet of water in their homes.....they were both in their seventies......then Dennis came a year later.........they are gone, and they bought their houses before I was their neighbor, and I built my house eight feet higher than theirs.....so I guess I was telling them something about my knowledge when I built and compacted a five foot base of clay, and then built three extra feet over a crawl space.

Mr Ichi wrote:Point was, that if your property failed a perk test you could plan accordingly.  Or you could just build and claim you did not know any better.  

You couldn't get a septic tank permit. If you had a bad perk test, you had to put in an engineered septic tank system. I don't know about Pensacola but here in Tallahassee such a system costs in the neighborhood of $15,000.

With such a rain, you're going to have flooding. Period. If you don't live in an area higher than the majority of land around you, buy flood insurance. Something as simple as clogged drain pipes under a highway or railroad can cause flooding in areas that "never" flooded before.

If you don't want to do any of the above, self insure and see how that works.

As heavy as the recent rains were, the flooding might not have been so widespread without the record rainfall we'd already had. The water simply had no place to go. I don't believe I've ever seen lightning like we had that night...and I hope to never see it again.