Arena foundations issue

[tanira]

Hi all, looking for a bit of advice.

Two years ago I had a new arena installed. I had it done with carpet gallop and as per their instructions, this doesn't need foundations. I had a "professional" company install the arena but believe they may no longer be a company.

The school membrane has gone through and although the surface under the school was taken back to thick chalk to prep it, it now looks to have thick mud underneath it that the horse put their foot through as they go over it. I'm really rather upset about it given it is a really low milage school that was done 2 years ago. I'm unsure how I could fix this or if its going to be a case of investing yet again in a new school not long after nearly spending 20k on it 2 years ago (there was an arena there before but it wasn't done professionally like this).

Any advice would be great.

 

[Red-1]

I'm afraid that it sounds like it will need re-doing.

I say this as someone with experience of a badly done one at work. That company went bust, after many attempts to fix it that just seemed to make it worse. It supposedly came with a guarantee, but that company went bust at the same time... In the end it just needed doing, as it was a danger to all that used it.

A good school will have deep drainage and much hard core, compacted down. I don't know another way to do it.

Was it paid for even partly on a credit card? Or, do you have legal insurance with your house?

 

[tanira]

So frustrating, especially as it has such little use and has been down such a short period of time. As you say though, I'm concerned it's a vet bill waiting to happen.

It did have drainage put into it but was just taken back to the hard chalk underneath. I think it will likely, as you say, need to come up then have foundation put in to make it workable. ?

 

[catembi]

My own personal disaster: www.cheapmanege.weebly.com

 

[irishdraft]

Anyone who tells you proper groundwork eg hardcore, drains and a membrane are not required for an arena probably don't know what they are talking about . Sadly I think you will need to get it redone . My arena was also an old one previously but we had it done with decent ground work and it's still as good 20 years later.

 

[tanira]

Anyone who tells you proper groundwork eg hardcore, drains and a membrane are not required for an arena probably don't know what they are talking about . Sadly I think you will need to get it redone . My arena was also an old one previously but we had it done with decent ground work and it's still as good 20 years later.

This is how carpet gallop suggest the schools are set up, that they don't need sand underneath it. It had drainage put in and was taken back to the hardcore chalk surface. I think it will need taking back up and having the aggregate put down. Maybe I'll contact carpet gallop but last time I contacted them to inform them their surface had "debree in it" they were useless.

 

[tanira]

My own personal disaster: www.cheapmanege.weebly.com

Thanks catembi. I was going to take a read but the page isn't loading.

 

[Parrotperson]

the reviews they have on line aren't great. A proper school would be properly drained and have hardcore. Anything without (whether they say it's ok or not) will eventually mean the horses going through it and risking harm.

Plenty of people complaining the surface contains bits of metal, carpet grips etc.

Sorry. I too think you need to do it properly.

 

[catembi]

I just tried it and while the mobile version doesn’t seem to load, the web one does.

 

[PurBee]

Its strange for mud to be bubbling up if the whole school was prepped down to hard layer of chalk.
It makes me question if you have tiny underground springs?
Depending on your location this is a possibility.

I live in a valley where there are many tiny springs, that aren’t gushing like a tap....but literally water slowly seeps to the surface and drains off.
There’s an area which i put down 8 inches of hardcore ontop of scraped back to dense limestone base. Some time after the hardcore became a spongey surface. The horses could poach it. I had pink/golden adobe wet-clay-like gunk rise up from deeper underground.
I got a digger and the practice is to plough more hardcore into the tiny springs to redivert them. I managed to bury a 3 foot boulder into this area pushing it in with a digger bucket!

So if you’re dealing with underground springs its very difficult , as like mine, i have a massive drain right by this particular area i mentioned and another drain 5 m away....yet between the drains this soft, spongey patch appeared. It still seeps water, as i see it when we have weeks of dry weather, but having forced in loads of hardcore its now firm for horses.

My particular hardcore area has a slope to it for drainage anyway. With springs, no matter how small, they have to make it to the surface due to the pressure of the water channels underground. You’d have to dig very deep to redirect one.
One area i dug out 5 foot deep and hardcored it, to drain the spring better.

What a pain you have only had it down 2 years. Can you claim on your house insurance? Sue the company? This is an anomaly as the company may well have built it right and small springs arent easily detected, as sometimes theyre seasonal and only seep in winter months when the water table rises, so the company may not have seen evidence of springs and built it like normal.

The way to test for a spring is to get a long metal spike and at the spongey areas of your arena see if you can poke it into the ground. You should easily be able to. Water will be pooling underneath and you could well have pockets of water under a harder chalk layer.
When i dug drains around my buildings/barns and fields, the amount of times i hit a mini-spring were too many to count. Pink sloppy adobe oozed up out of the drains causing the shape of the drains to collapse and need re-digging. Many areas around buildings i was digging up a hardcore layer of cobblestones to find a large pool of water underneath.
I piped and used gravel stone to keep them draining, and the whole area has firmed up now the mini-springs have something to drain into.

 

[tanira]

Its strange for mud to be bubbling up if the whole school was prepped down to hard layer of chalk.
It makes me question if you have tiny underground springs?
Depending on your location this is a possibility.

I live in a valley where there are many tiny springs, that aren’t gushing like a tap....but literally water slowly seeps to the surface and drains off.
There’s an area which i put down 8 inches of hardcore ontop of scraped back to dense limestone base. Some time after the hardcore became a spongey surface. The horses could poach it. I had pink/golden adobe wet-clay-like gunk rise up from deeper underground.
I got a digger and the practice is to plough more hardcore into the tiny springs to redivert them. I managed to bury a 3 foot boulder into this area pushing it in with a digger bucket!

So if you’re dealing with underground springs its very difficult , as like mine, i have a massive drain right by this particular area i mentioned and another drain 5 m away....yet between the drains this soft, spongey patch appeared. It still seeps water, as i see it when we have weeks of dry weather, but having forced in loads of hardcore its now firm for horses.

My particular hardcore area has a slope to it for drainage anyway. With springs, no matter how small, they have to make it to the surface due to the pressure of the water channels underground. You’d have to dig very deep to redirect one.
One area i dug out 5 foot deep and hardcored it, to drain the spring better.

What a pain you have only had it down 2 years. Can you claim on your house insurance? Sue the company? This is an anomaly as the company may well have built it right and small springs arent easily detected, as sometimes theyre seasonal and only seep in winter months when the water table rises, so the company may not have seen evidence of springs and built it like normal.

The way to test for a spring is to get a long metal spike and at the spongey areas of your arena see if you can poke it into the ground. You should easily be able to. Water will be pooling underneath and you could well have pockets of water under a harder chalk layer.
When i dug drains around my buildings/barns and fields, the amount of times i hit a mini-spring were too many to count. Pink sloppy adobe oozed up out of the drains causing the shape of the drains to collapse and need re-digging. Many areas around buildings i was digging up a hardcore layer of cobblestones to find a large pool of water underneath.
I piped and used gravel stone to keep them draining, and the whole area has firmed up now the mini-springs have something to drain into.

Thanks purbee, that's really interesting because it is sort of like that. It's like a silty soil coming up, only in one spot and I've not idea where the soil is coming from given it was taken back to hard chalk. My only thought is, the drainage is, it's a spring like you suggested or the drainage is blocked. However, the area is on a slight slope and this is at the top of that slope, so you'd think it would drain downwards?

I'm going to have to take the surface in that area up and see what's happening underneath it. At least with carpet it will be easier to do that with than sand. Thanks for the advice, I'll do some more reading on springs.

 

[PurBee]

Thanks purbee, that's really interesting because it is sort of like that. It's like a silty soil coming up, only in one spot and I've not idea where the soil is coming from given it was taken back to hard chalk. My only thought is, the drainage is, it's a spring like you suggested or the drainage is blocked. However, the area is on a slight slope and this is at the top of that slope, so you'd think it would drain downwards?

I'm going to have to take the surface in that area up and see what's happening underneath it. At least with carpet it will be easier to do that with than sand. Thanks for the advice, I'll do some more reading on springs.

The gradient of the land doesnt factor into an underground water source. I’ve got them exiting at the apex of slopes too. When it reaches the surface it can drain away down the slope, but a spring is like an ever-flowing, allbeit very slowly, water source so the surface area where it exits from underground, and the subsoil layers, especially if they’re dense like chalk/limestone, act as a ‘plug’ but the spring water will drench these hard sublayers which then constantly remain very wet...soggy.

If you do the long thin metal rod test you should find youll pierce the ground easily. You may even find you can ‘stir’ the rod, suggesting sloshyness underneath. I use a 5 foot heavy metal leverage bar...my OH got it for god knows what but its useful for finding springs!

Many small flow springs are seasonal and so if youve found the drenched areas to be worse in winter than summer that’s a good sign and you would want to dig that soggy patch to solid ground, then dig a channel away from the source, preferably sloping down and away from the source, pipe it, and use drain stone around your pipe, and you can even put hardcore ontop of that and re-lay your surface as its an underground water source youre draining away, not surface rain water.

IF it is surface rainwater collecting in a patch, normally that would make its way to the lowest part of your arena, and would not be sitting at the top of a slope - suggesting its an underground water source than surface water not draining away.

(If you had drains dug throughout your arena and then a layer of hardcore put ontop and compressed, surface rain water wont make its way to drain through compressed hardcore, so the drainwork is useless and wont be serving the function intended.)

Springs can be a nightmare to deal with, but hopefully yours sounds like its very slow seeping, and slowly drenching all the upper layer making them soggy...so would require just a small drain dug, piped, from the soggiest part and sloping away.

I have a peat soil grass field and there was a spot in it about 2x2metres which i could bounce on like a trampoline! When the tracks of the digger were moving across the deep peat parts, i could feel the vibration of the tracks standing in the field from 30 metres away. Underground water collected there and had no where to go. The grass roots were the only matting holding the surface together. Would have been deadly to allow the horses near! I dug 4 foot deep x 2 foot wide drains around the worst part of the field, and it took a year for the water to redirect itself to the drains and the surface to firm up. Its brilliant pasture now.

Fingers crossed its an easy fix for you xx

 

[PurBee]

How many places in your arena is this soggy mud happening? Is it overall?

I just thought that it may be possible the arena builders scraped back to a subsoil chalk layer, which may only be 4inches and there’s a soil layer below that. Only a large dug hole will show the soil layers, to discover where true dense hardcore layer is. They could have thought theyve hit 1 foot of dense chalk and kept to that, whereas it may have just been a thin chalk layer.

As it was built where an arena was previously, maybe the chalk layer is what was installed as a ‘hardcore’ layer over the original topsoil? Maybe when it was first built no-one took off the topsoil and just built a small ‘hard chalk’ layer ontop?

Over time that chalk would be prone to absorbing rainwater, becoming mushy, subsoil of that layer also becoming mushy, and youre now piercing through your membrane all over your arena Into the original topsoil layer under the thin chalk Layer.

If the above case is true i’d sue your latest arena builders for not investigating the subsoil layers properly. Can you do this through your property insurance maybe?
They would have effectively built an arena on a pad of an ever-increasing saturating topsoil/chalk layer.

 

[tanira]

When they built this school they went down further than the original school and took up the foundation for that school which was like scrapping of some form. The chalk is what our ground is made of. We are on chalk rather than say, clay. So they went down taking off the top soil etc. That being said, not sure what's below it and I doubt they were either.

It's currently only in one area, just worried this is the start of it all going through or it's an issue with the drainage.