Just How Wet is the Soil in SC? #scflood

We sent our son out to test the water table in the yard for us, in order to assess how likely it was we’d have trouble with septic tank.

We live on sandy soil (well-drained to a fault) on the highest ground there is in our area — you can literally only go downhill from our home.  We’re on a massive bluff.  (Contrary to a distant reader’s mistaken assumption, the western two-thirds of SC are rolling hills, not flatland).

In sum: We’ve got some of the driest possible soil conditions around, and have the floundering garden to prove it.

Three feet.  You hit water at three feet.  As my son puts it, “Liquid water that you could drink.”

This is not normal.  The kids have dug pits in the yard before (don’t yours?), we’ve called-and-dug for this and that over the years, and we’ve never hit water.  Nothing close to it.

This is unheard of.  And hence the catastrophic failure of the usually-reliable ditch-and-dam drainage system.  Ireland?  Pacific Northwest?  Please come get your weather now.  We want ours back.

Artwork: ”Flood Sufferings” (1890, oil on canvas, 110.0 x 153.5 cm) by Aby Altson (1866–1948). The painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons.