My neighbor and the cattleguard...

[Three Foot Johnson]

About four years ago, I sold 130 acres and one of the stipulations was there were to be no gates across the access road. A few days ago, he contracted with a local company to fabricate and install a cattleguard. Immediately, within crossing it only a couple times, fill dirt started sloughing off each end/side and into the pit underneath. Dirt, not gravel or road mix, dirt. The stuff that immediately turns to mud when it rains. It's also installed about a foot and a half above grade with a short, steep approach on each side... of dirt. I stopped and took a closer look at it a couple days after the install, and there are no battens installed between the concrete piers along the top to prevent this sloughing problem. Then I saw the UF/UDB phone cable completely exposed in the bottom of the pit - I'm not crawling under there to see if it's damaged, maybe call the phone company and report it anyway, whoever the phone company is anymore - I haven't had a landline in twenty years. So I called the neighbor to discuss it (he was working out of town), and he had a ten yard load of road mix delivered the next day to have the company effect repairs when they get around to it sometime NEXT WEEK. No problem... I guess... I can use the gate right next to the cattleguard in the meantime, right? Um... no... WTH? What driver would have ever thought, "Where's the best place to dump this load? I know, right in front of the gate, so it'll block the only other ingress/egress to that house up there". (That would be my house.) Oh, and using the gate would actually put me off the road right-of-way and onto another neighbor's property to get around the cattleguard. I called the new neighbor and asked him what the load limit on it is, and he had no idea. The stringers are five 4" pipes spanning seven feet. I emailed the place that fabbed it, asking what the engineering specs are on it and they won't reply. This road regularly has 25+ ton loads on it, occasionally topping 30 tons, and I'd really like to know what the cattleguard load rating is. Near as I can figure, the truck that delivered the road mix probably grossed 25-26 tons, and he went across it, probably before he realized the fill was caving in, exacerbating the problem.

Some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug. 

[Subdeacon Joe]

What 3 year old designed that?

 

Sounds like you need to get the owner of that company out to look at his company's work. 

 

 

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

Go public.  If the owner of the company thinks it is going to hurt his business he might fix it.

 

Take lots of pictures and document the whole thing....just in case someone wants to sue someone for defamation or some such.  More witnesses are always good, too.

[Grass Range]

Very poor installation and build. Cattle guards should be 16 feet wide and set on concrete

[Big Sage, SASS #49891 Life]

Tell your neighbor to watch the episode of Yellowstone that has the cattle guard conflict in it. Maybe he will get the massage. 

[Cypress Sun]

48 minutes ago, Big Sage, SASS #49891 Life said:

Tell your neighbor to watch the episode of Yellowstone that has the cattle guard conflict in it. Maybe he will get the massage. 

 

That's a good one. Ah hell with it, time to get out the cooler. Gotta have a snake bite with a massage.

 

[Trailrider #896]

Have you talked to a/your lawyer? 

[Three Foot Johnson]

6 hours ago, Grass Range said:

Very poor installation and build. Cattle guards should be 16 feet wide and set on concrete

It is. It's 16' wide and spans 7+ feet. There are three pre-cast concrete blocks on each side - one on each end and one in the middle, six total. The fill gave way between the blocks, which is where traffic is going to be on a one-lane dirt road - right in the middle, so your wheels are tracking between the blocks. 

 

A lawyer is a bit extreme at this point, and I agreed to use the gate in the meantime... except neither of us realized it was blocked... 

As long as you know where to drive, you can straddle the cave-ins, but if FedEx, UPS, fire truck, Sheriff, whatever, comes up the road, they won't see it til too late and they're leaving on a trailer or behind a tow truck. The land owner or fab company should really have put up a temporary stop sign, barricade, caution tape, SOMETHING, but they haven't. In an emergency, I can cut the fence to get out, and I contacted the assistant chief of the local VFD and told him about it, so if they need in, they'll also just cut the fence and go around everything.