Any structural engineer peeps here ?

I've never seen problems arising from heave like this. In the UK, heave in clay soils will gradually damage buildings over years, if not decades. Typically masonry buildings will show cracks running diagonally from corners of walls to corners of windows/doors. In addition, all modern UK construction in areas suceptible to heave have heave protection measures installed e.g. compressible material against foundations or under ground floor slabs, or leave anything from 50 to 250mm void under the ground floor.

In your case, difficult to say not knowing the ground conditions, but it is possible heave caused a pipe (or something else under the floor) to be raised so much that it pushed the floor up sharply. But to cause that sort of damage if a massive deal. It should not be underplayed!

ANy other signs of damage around the house?
 
Doesn't Florida have an extensive aquifer network? could be ground movement due to that with the weather though seems unlikely they'd build where it was really prone to that.
 
Rroff said:
Doesn't Florida have an extensive aquifer network? could be ground movement due to that with the weather though seems unlikely they'd build where it was really prone to that.
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More central than where I'm at... Underwater caves and sink holes are a problem up central FL
 
Well if you have a crack in your concrete, and your damp proof membrane is equally damaged, then you could get damp or even water ingress if there's heavy rainfall and the ground water rises.
 
Hmm. Having looked at that picture you posted of the development under construction it looks like the floor slab was going in at about 6 inches depth. It's quite hard to gauge but those spacer blocks on that slab look to be about 50mm and the shuttering is about 4 times the size so maybe it was just a bit too skinny a slab for the conditions.

Pure conjecture of course but it does look to be a bit of a skimpy floor slab for the underlying conditions.
 
Hopefully its just the thermal expansion.

I have seen ground heave similar that in the uk (but on a much larger scale) which was caused by artesian pressure.
The company I work for had a contractor design and construct a large underground tank (20m diameter x 15m deep) made from large concrete segments. Once it had been constructed the artesian pressure below the structure (which they did not take into account) actually lifted the whole thing out of the ground by 8 inches.

:eek:
 
Weird things do happen tho. I once had a nice glass table, that was expensive & actually purchased in England and bought over to the USA when i originally moved here. One day sitting in my living room I heard an almighty explosion. I thought a car had somehow crashed into the front of my house or something. All it was, was the damn glass table exploding into a million pieces, for no apparent reason either.

I guess that was thermal expansion also.
 
thedoc46 said:
Weird things do happen tho. I once had a nice glass table, that was expensive & actually purchased in England and bought over to the USA when i originally moved here. One day sitting in my living room I heard an almighty explosion. I thought a car had somehow crashed into the front of my house or something. All it was, was the damn glass table exploding into a million pieces, for no apparent reason either.

I guess that was thermal expansion also.
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Nope. That was Demnons.
 
I've seen contractors in America dig down over 3 meters to find stable ground conditions, then backfill with literally hundreds of tonnes of rock.

Here we just seem to lay a thin slab and then fill the back garden with rubble and lawn seed?

Rising water is an unstoppable force, so I could easily imagine that flood waters could do that kind of damage. Inadequate piling maybe?
 
thedoc46 said:
Weird things do happen tho. I once had a nice glass table, that was expensive & actually purchased in England and bought over to the USA when i originally moved here. One day sitting in my living room I heard an almighty explosion. I thought a car had somehow crashed into the front of my house or something. All it was, was the damn glass table exploding into a million pieces, for no apparent reason either.

I guess that was thermal expansion also.
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Nope, just nickel sulphide inclusions.
Even heat soaked glass can and does explode due to NiS inclusions as heat soaking only helps to identify and break glass that has large quantities of NiS.
 
thedoc46 said:
Weird things do happen tho. I once had a nice glass table, that was expensive & actually purchased in England and bought over to the USA when i originally moved here. One day sitting in my living room I heard an almighty explosion. I thought a car had somehow crashed into the front of my house or something. All it was, was the damn glass table exploding into a million pieces, for no apparent reason either.

I guess that was thermal expansion also.
Click to expand...

We had a sliding panel in our shower do that - it was the only one in direct sunlight and it was during one of the hottest summers in awhile - 2006 or so? just exploded into millions of tiny pieces with a lot of noise completely randomly.
 
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