Bayard Construction Group

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Just another Friday moving dirt at Bayard.

And Yeah - it’s payday! 💰

Phase 3 | Managing the Groundwater

This is where dam building gets complicated…

When you’re cutting a core trench 30 feet deep you’re eventually going to hit groundwater. We hit the water table and now we have to deal with it before we can go any further.

You can’t place compacted soil in standing water. It won’t compact, it won’t bond, and it will never meet the structural requirements the dam needs. So here’s how you handle it.

We’re cutting a ditch to the lowest elevation we can reach and creating a ledge for the pump to sit on. A hose drops into the lowest point of that ditch and pulls the water out continuously while we keep cutting. That’s what you’re watching here — two excavators moving bulk material out while the third excavator in the background is cutting that pump ledge.

Once the water is under control and we reach the bottom of the core we bring in surge stone — large, angular rock that water moves through freely. It doesn’t compact like soil, which is exactly the point. It gives us a stable working platform below the water table that we can build on. We bring it up to the water table elevation and then bench above it with suitable soil, picking up our 6 inch compacted lifts from there all the way to the top.

The surge stone is essentially bridging the gap between wet unstable ground and where solid construction can begin.

Shoutout to our partners at for keeping us supplied with the stone that makes this possible.