What's the most unusual place you have had to well point? STUMP KNOCKER
What do you mean? Drill a well?
Are you talking about sucking underground water on the job untill they get enough of the structure up and it is capable of stabilizing itself in place ?
Yes
Had a job once doing the dirtwork at a dam site. Moretrench out of Chicago was handling the well points and dewatering 17 feet below the water line. They had 102 points down hooked to a big manifold with two pumps going 24/7. I had excavated down to grade and the concrete boys were to start with forms in the morning. The engineer on the project had design a coffer dam upstream to handle the river. The dam didn't hold letting the raging river come down on the project. Everything was a loss! I had two cats onsite. Had to take a canoe out to them. As blind luck would have it, we had parked the cats on a high spot. We got the cats out by driving thru the current, but everything else on the construction site was a total loss. There were some buildings onsite that ended up with 5 feet of water inside. Moretrench delivered a totally new dewatering system onsite and we started all over again. To make a long story short we finished that project a year later. And then another year of lawsuits. The engineer responsible for the coffer design was also going thru a divorce at the same time of the lawsuits and commited suicide. Im glad that job is behind me.
It wasn`t the most unusual location, but it was one of the worst. We had set the header pipe and points. They had been sucking water for a few weeks when the drill crews came in for the caisson holes. I think they were around 10` augers if I remember correctly. They had two cranes both with Caldwells set up on them. Don`t remember how deep the holes were, but they got the auger stuck one day and couldn`t get it out. They decided to pull the pin on the kelly bar and pull it with the crane. They lowered two Pile Drivers down in a basket with a torch to cut the bolt off the box. When they lit the torch, it blew out the hole like a Roman candle. They had hit a pocket of gas and the sniffers were in the trailer. One was dead when the basket got to the top, the other guy died a few days later.