Is Florida made of sand?

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
News Flash, Tampa Florida:

Highly educated engineers have teams of men investigating what kind of soil is 2 feet under the streets of Florida. A pickup truck and two guys in their 20's are drilling a 4 inch hole, every 100 feet in my street today in order to find out what kind of soil is under it.

I suggested that it would be easier to drill through the sod in my yard, but they persisted in making holes in the blacktop street. After I stopped laughing, I asked if they had ever found anything but sand within a hundred miles of here. They said, "No" and I resumed doubling over with laughter.

The deaf guy next door arrived and I told him what they were doing. He laughed so hard that he fell against his van and slid to the ground.

Good logic. If you didn't laugh, you would have to cry.
This is like sending investigative teams to scientifically determine whether bears poop in the woods or whether the Pope is Catholic.

What can I say? It's good for employment? Taxes must be too high here? University prices are prohibitively high because they are teaching these incredibly high tech methods?

I'm going to stop now. I feel my emotions changing from laughing to crying.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Around here we have better things to do with our tax money.

They like to pave a street. then dig it up and install new sewer lines then repave it then dig it up again and install the water lines repave then dig it up and install the power or gas line then pave it again.

In the winter they spread sand then plow the snow off then re sand.

BTW the plowing and sanding trucks are the same units and they can in fact plow and spread sand at the same time. They don't but they are more than capable of doing it. :rolleyes:
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
The normal thing here is to change a 2 lane road to a 4 lane road, which includes moving all the telephone poles, sidewalks, business entrances, traffic signals, etc. That takes about 4 years. Then they immediately change it to a 6 lane street, moving all the utilities and sidewalks again.

Hey, you have to spend all that tax money on something.:rolleyes:
 

alfacliff

Joined Dec 13, 2013
2,458
hee in wichita, they widened west street. then the various poeple came out and made the new concrete a checkerboard moving the utilities. then about 3 years later, they put in new storm drains to replace the ones burried by the provious widening.
also, they fix potholes when its raining, just splash the mud and water out with the shovelfull of asphalt, and tamp it down with their foot. incase you didnt know, asphalt is oil based and wont stick to mud or wet pavement.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
incase you didnt know, asphalt is oil based and wont stick to mud or wet pavement.
I think you have to not know that in order to get a job working on road repair crews.

It's sort of like becoming a country gravel road maintainer operator around here. You have to specifically show absolutely no skill or concern for developing the skill of running one of those machines in order to become an operator. :rolleyes:
 

Metalmann

Joined Dec 8, 2012
703
I think you have to not know that in order to get a job working on road repair crews.

It's sort of like becoming a country gravel road maintainer operator around here. You have to specifically show absolutely no skill or concern for developing the skill of running one of those machines in order to become an operator. :rolleyes:


In the 1940s-60s, it was commonplace to also see the crews spread used motor oil down after the graders went through.
To keep down the dust.
Then, we had to wash it off our vehicles.



"Is Florida made of sand?"

I always thought of Florida as one gigantic, prehistoric, sand dune.

Which would explain the plague of sinkholes.
 
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ErnieM

Joined Apr 24, 2011
8,377
I don't know about Florida, but here on Long Island we're on a terminal moraine (the place where an ice age glacier melts and dumps all the soil it's carried).

Yep, we're made of sand.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
I always thought of Florida as one gigantic, prehistoric, sand dune.
Same here. There is a core of limestone down there, somewhere, but not 2 feet down.:rolleyes:

Just looking at a map of the Gulf of Mexico will lead you to the idea that the Gulf Stream is going to dump sand as it swirls out of the Gulf. From that idea, I think a limestone peninsula initiated or enhanced the process. Now, Florida is, for all practical purposes, a sand bar.

At my house, there is a shell layer at 7 feet down, then it resumes being sand, at least as far as the 10 feet I went while attaching a vertical light pole to the planet. I assume it goes farther because I have seen people digging water wells with 10 foot sections of PVC pipe and a garden hose. Compared to places with bedrock at the surface, we have it easy here.:p
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
I think a limestone peninsula initiated or enhanced the process. Now, Florida is, for all practical purposes, a sand bar.
Geologically that's exactly what it is. Before the last ice age when ocean levels were 100 - 200 feet higher most of Florida was under water and basically as you guys say one huge sand bar that formed over a limestone base.

Now North Dakota on the other had is basically varying layers of hard packed earth with no true stony bedrock for 15,000 - 18,000+ feet which makes deep well oil drilling and fracking a breeze! ;)

The worse thing they have to drill through is hard packed shale clay. It's not quite stone but not exactly malleable clay either. It's sort of like plasticized rock. ;)
 

Metalmann

Joined Dec 8, 2012
703
Since limestone and sand are permeable, that would cause the sinkholes. Add a little too much water, and.......

I have dug down several places in Indiana, first you get loam, sand, then clay. Actually dug out and made articles of the clay, varied in colors from yellow, red, blues, and grays.

Some places had topsoil of hard clay, (A bitch to garden), then sand.
 

PackratKing

Joined Jul 13, 2008
847
Upstate NY, north of Albany, is predominately sand... Makes for a very thirsty drywell once you get down to original ledge... it percolates a phenomenal amount of water in short order...

Post script a few weeks later... This drywell is only to disperse roof runoff in thunderstorms, or other heavy rain... and an occaisional shot of fungicide to keep the works clean...
 
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Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Upstate NY, north of Albany, is predominately sand... Makes for a very thirsty drywell once you get down to original ledge... it percolates a phenomenal amount of water in short order...
Hey! Watch what you dump in there. It eventually comes up, somewhere.

Seriously. Burns Romines used to shove dead cows into the sink holes of Kentucky and I personally had to take antibiotics to get over what came up our 90 foot deep water well. Point is, the time constant on local water can be as short as a few months.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Upstate NY, north of Albany, is predominately sand... Makes for a very thirsty drywell once you get down to original ledge... it percolates a phenomenal amount of water in short order...
Fortunately for our oil industry we have a massive salt brine aquifer around 5000 feet down that covers the whole state that has a massive dense impermeable clay formation above it. :)

The natural water there is so nasty as is it's safe to pump anything else down into it to dispose of whatever needs to be put some place it will never see the light of day again plus the combination of its depth and massive impermeable clay cap layer make sure what's down there stays down there.

When I drove water truck in the oil fields a few summers ago I had plenty of time to talk with the disposal well operators who pumped our loads of oil well water back down there.
They said that samples of the natural brine sludge that is in the formation is so loaded with mixed salts and naturally occurring sludges that anything that comes back from a oil well is already cleaner and less toxic than most of what is down there to begin with. ;)
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Stupid question time: If that brine layer has the weight of 5000 feet of soil on top of it, does it squirt upwards when you make a hole in the clay layer? How far up?

Seems like a perfect setup for an artesian well of horrid sludge.:eek:
 
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PackratKing

Joined Jul 13, 2008
847
Not to worry #12... the only thing going down my drywell, is rainwater off the roof...

Learning just how big that freakin' percolation area had to be to absorb the water, I had no clue just how much water a 21 x 80 roof can collect in a deluge... :eek: but I found out in a screamin' big hurry... :D
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Lesee...16.8 squares at an inch per hour...math math math...2.33 cubic feet per minute.

Not a problem for a 4 inch sewer pipe, but a world of hurt if it's coming in the house.:rolleyes:
 
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PackratKing

Joined Jul 13, 2008
847
You might want to try a little different math... Next storm, leave something out in direct rain, that can catch it all.

measure how much water in the bucket after it stops

an example figure, say you got an inch & 1/2 in the bucket. multiply that 1-1/2 X 144 [ sq in. per sq. ft ] is 216 cu. in .. multiply that by the square footage of the roof, in my case 1,680 sq. ft. x 216 = 362,880 cu. in.. divide that by 1,728 cu. in / ft. = 210 cu. ft. > multiply by 8.4 gal. - cu. ft. that equals 1,764 gallons of runoff....:eek:

Feed that to a drywell...:D or let the downspout wash a trench in your yard :rolleyes:

Picture is the start of the job -- it finished and was buried a helluva lot bigger
 

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Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Did I do the math wrong or are you just phrasing it differently?

Never mind. You're just doing it by the hour. I did it by the minute. 2&1/3 CFM per inch of rain in an hour.
You did 1.5 inch per hour for an hour.
 
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