Cement Bag Culvert Repair

Some time ago, we experienced a washout of one of our culverts under our farm road. This washout had the potential to damage the culvert and wash out part of the road. In this post, I will discuss the steps we took to repair it. 

 First, we began with the excavation work. I hired a guy to come in and clean out the fill on either side of the culvert. He also widened it a little bit so that the water would have a place to hold prior to going into the culvert in case there was a large rain coming in. 

Along the roadway, we had him dig out approximately the length and width of one cement bag, which basically worked out to be about the size of his bucket. Once we had that in place, we built a footer using three cement bags to form two lengthwise and one in the rear width-wise. We also placed a bag underneath the culvert to form a little stop so water could not get under there. 

We then built four layers utilizing the cement bags and once that was put into place, we went ahead and built the key around the culvert itself. Once we had this in place, we ran rebar vertically through each of the bags down into the ground, approximately about a foot and a half. 

The "key" built on the culvert. 

As we continued to build the wall with the next layers, we also backfilled with aggregate. When we built the wall higher, we started taking additional rebar and driving them in vertically and then also laying sections horizontally across each of the rows. 

Once the wall was level with the road, we added more aggregate behind the wall, and then we started taking short pieces of rebar and driving them downward and diagonally into the cement bags. When the wall was finished, we continued to backfill and level out with the aggregate. We then took short pieces of rebar and drove them straight down through each of the cement bags, leaving approximately a 4-inch tail that was exposed. 

Finally, we took the last cement bags and placed them on top so that each bag had that 4-inch piece of exposed rebar pressed through the underside. This gives us a nice flat smooth look to the concrete bags once we remove the packaging after a couple of months of the cement setting. 

The capping bags are laid on top of the bags with the 4-inch rebar tails.

I apologize for not having enough pictures as taking pictures was not something I was thinking about at that time because this was my first big project after coming out of the hospital. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments, and as I go back and look for those YouTube videos that were inspirational to our build, I will post them within this blog posting.

Girl Power!