Excavation surprises

[mekon]

Have been digging a new foundation in the footprint of a just demolished building.A small soil correction under the footings and floor slab.
Well along with buried burned out rubble,a large tree trunk and 2 very large concrete foundations from some equipment from yesteryear I found a well casing in the middle of foundation area.
There was a note on the plan about a possible well location so the state health department had to come down 2 days later to inspect and he located one more outside of the building and then this one he located and had me poke around for.He figures it's 25 to 30 feet deep down to a well casing.A vac truck comes Wednesday to help finish the exploration.

 

[CM1995]

We've found all sorts of surprises over the years. The most interesting is the build over build sites where over the years the same site has been many different things.

Did a dollar store back in '13 where we tore down the strip center built in the '60's to find the remnants of burned down shotgun houses complete with brick paver front stoops only to find topsoil and barbed wire a 1' or so under the burned debris. So it was kinda neat we were prepping the site for it's 4th use.

A couple of years ago we did the excavation work for an arena expansion and found all sorts of industrial foundations, furnaces and boilers from the steel boom here back in the late 1800's, early 1900's.

Keeps us on our toes right?

 

[skyking1]

I like the old industrial sites. I have found some cool glass, I have a snake oil bottle on a river job that had the words cast into the glass, so it is timeless.
Last week I had the run of the mill worksite/dumping ground for a contractor. It was "reinforced" with all sorts of crap, lots of old reinforced hoses. Those are pretty strong eh?
There was a chunk of tree in there we identified as a madrona.

The wood really turned purple underground.

 

[OzDozer]

When you're doing open-cut mining over old underground workings, finding large stopes from old workings gets your heartbeat up!

The company mines usually kept fairly good records of underground workings, and the largest portion of those records have survived until today.
However, there's always the mines where records were not so good, or enthusiastic prospectors opened up stopes without keeping records!

The photos are from around 1992, the ground here was pretty solid, and the truck didn't drop anything more than a front wheel into the opening.
The ladder was to check out the stope, and any other potential unknown holes around it!

 

[CM1995]

However, there's always the mines where records were not so good, or enthusiastic prospectors opened up stopes without keeping records!

Nothing that dramatic however the southwest corner of the county I live in is know for "wildcat" coal mines dug around the turn of the 20th century. Independent miners dug many small shafts mining coal to sell to the local broker who would put it on a trail bound for the steel mills. There are little to no records when they were sunk just what's been found over the years.

I have ran across a few over the years. County built a new high school and spent a fortune filling an old shaft in. US Steel gave them the property but I'm not so sure how good of a deal it was in the end.