Jeremy our architect was a witness to the collapse of the wall and very kindly came along on Saturday and spent a sweltering day (29 degrees) shoveling with Nick.
It was very useful to uncover things because it turns out our mistrust of the foam glass base was unwarrented. In was entirely intact and it became obvious that it was the wall itself that had collapsed. On reflection, and having chatted today with Rowland Keable (whom has been involved with a lot of the largest REWs around including at the CAT centre), we are pretty sure our error was in failing to allow the bottom of the wall to dry before piling on the weight. So the shuttering came off and we had a damp wall trying to support 13 tonnes. Aaaah, hindsight.
It did look great though before it fell:
Lovely layers. (and cement cap)
Archaeology layer.
Majestic. Sigh.
Can't quite bring myself to post the post fall pics just yet. But we are getting over the shock of it all and steeling ourselves for another build. Lots of phone calls today and getting our heads around the cost implications and task ahead. It is a house building rule to have a 10% contingency fund. We thought we might spend it on the garage if we managed to be disciplined enough through the build. But no, we've gone and done a grand designs style disaster ...
Soil samples are being sent for testing tomorrow. We will get a stabilised sample (7% cement added) and an unstablised sample tested for strength so we can work out how much of the wall we need to stabilise to make sure the next one stays up. We have to build quickly as delay = cost for the main build so we don't have the luxury of having a spare couple of weeks to dry bits of the wall. We are also entering into frosty season ... that's the other thing that could put pay to a damp wall no matter how strong it is. Hence, we will most likely stabilise the bottom half and leave just the top unstabilised. Still organising everything and checking costs but this is the plan at the moment.
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