Sinkholes in stone driveway - how to fix

[Tekkie®]

Anyone is SE Pennsylvania have experience with sinkholes in their stone driveways and how to fix them?

[dadiOH]

Sinkholes? Honest-to-gawd sinkholes? Pump in 100s - 1000s of yards of concrete.

[yeeha]

This is a true story

A man had paid me to move a small storage building.

I called a rollback wrecker and had them pull it up on the wrecker bed on skids

we shuttle over to the drop site

The rollback driver tilts his bed back and starts to shake the storage building off... everythings cool... a perfect drop is underway.

all of a sudden the rollback's right rear sinks into the ground up to the tandum the building is leaning waaaaay over to the right... looks like we might lose it.

so! using the mechanics of the rollback bed, the operator lifts his rear wheels off the ground.. I backfill the sink hole with concrete blocks...

(he can only move forward after his wheels are on the ground)

he sets his wheels back down but it pushes the block deeper into the ground (about 4-5 blocks)... so we repeat the backfill process.. more blocks...

the same thing happens again, the right rear tandum sinks down to the ground over 1/2 the wheels are beneath ground level.

we do this about 2 more times... and finally a huge cavity opens up under wheels..about 5 -6 foot in diameter...

the rollback operator had to call his shop and have another tow truck come pull him out of the spot... the storage building comes off without incident.

Come to find out, we had broken through into an old railroad or civil war tunnel in churchill Richmond Va..

it was an old civil war tunnel

the thing is, I knew in my hear that the tunnel probably led to all sorts of civil war relics, but I had no rights as to a find or to explore (not that I would climb down in there)

I never knew what became of that site... but the home owner may have gotten rich from relics.

eh majer sinkhole

[Goedjn]

Doesn't matter where you are, the answer is the same... Dig up the sinkhole, see where the water is going, fill it with rock, and cover it back up.

[Tekkie®]

Goedjn posted for all of us...

Thanks, thats what I thought... open wallet project.

--=20 Tekkie "There's no such thing as a tool I don't need."

[mm]

After a web search, it appears to be Church Hill.

Very interesting. I have heard of Betty Van Lew before, but only a little bit. This makes it even more interesting.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gknJsBL-ZfcJ:

|lang_iw|lang_es It's written in a way that doesn't mention you, but it's very interesting.

[Although Betty did not see herself as a spy, it explains**] "spying" used to be so despised. Which 20th century US President said "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."? But one good spy can be more valuable than thousands of soldiers. and can probably save thousands of lives too, at least on the spy's side. **She saw herself, she explains, as a loyal American, who had not seceded from the Union.

I'm sure there is a lot more.

Your part in discovering part of this is very interesting.

Was it the one through which 100 prisoners at the Libby jail escaped? I was confused when I read that part.

And mostly about the prison break:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:TZzYGIC0MUwJ:members.aol.com/jweaver300/grayson/libby.htm+civil+war+tunnel+Richmond&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2&lr=lang_en|lang_iw|lang_es

[yeeha]

good question

I tell ya, the owner here was a backwards sort of fella just a simple man...

If I had a map of known tunnels, I would know what we found

now you got me looking for a tunnel map

[yeeha]

here is the Libby prison break tunnel

the libby tunnel was only 50' long.

So Im sure what we found was not the libby tunnel

I did say churchill, but that was reference to general area it was not actually ON churchill..

what we found was a tunnel, you could see very far to the left and to the right

I say very far, but the thing is..

you would have to go down into the ground about 8 feet to be standing on the tunnel floor...

it looked like we had broken through a decaying tunnel ...

it was suggested by the people involved that it was in fact an old civil war tunnel or an old railway tunnel used during the civil war

here is map to neighborhood where I delivered the building.

I can't remember the street, I think if I was driving there I could find it again

I grew up not too far from the site

any address that google may show on a sidebar is incidental it was just someones house.. no commercial buildings.

the area is montrose heights, richmond va the actual adress of the site is 5 mins from churchill

you did use the term interesting in your post

maybe you know of a possible tunnel in that area

I always intended to drive there ( I dont live in that city no more) and see what became of what we found.