[kaare]

Hi, I'm hoping that the good people of this community can suggest a workable solution to my leaning fence

Half a year ago my neighbor and I build a new fence and took care to do the job properly (or so we thought) - the posts are 2 meters apart, each 70 cm down, and each hole got an entire bag of cement.

However, a week ago we had a pretty severe storm, and the wind blowing in from the empty lot next door managed to tilt the fence up to 20 degrees (estimate). Apparently the earth was still pretty soft, both from digging, and from the construction work taking place on the other side.

I have uploaded a few pictures showing the fence leaning, and the gaps on the inside of the fence where the earth has been displaced. (EDIT: apparently I'm not allowed to place either links or images in my first post, so you'll just to imagine it for now

Any suggestions how to fix this? Getting it back to vertical is easily doable, but the question is how to stop the same thing from happening when the winter storms start blowing? Eventually the empty lot will have some nice tall buildings screening from the wind, but that will likely take a year or two more.
I have thought of ramming some steel bars into the ground next to the posts, but I suspect the concrete will make that pretty difficult. I could of course do it midway between two posts, but that seems more like a band aid than a proper solution.
We could also try to dig down on the inside of each post and pour in additional concrete?

any comments are appreciated

 

[CompleteW&D]

I suppose it all depends on "how much" work you want to do to correct this. It sounds like you may have some fairly loose soil with a lot of sand. If that's the case, then I don't think a re-bar driven in beside your post will help much.

If it's only a couple of posts that are leaning, I would dig those holes out and use concrete forms like sonotubes and fill with concrete inside those sonotubes. That should do the trick for you, but it's a LOT of work.

 

[Wildbill7145]

Sounds like you're in Canada?

I think you needed the posts to be around 4 feet deep. Around here, that's below the frost line. That's what I did. I seem to remember it taking more than a bag of concrete per post too.

In terms of soil, I've got basically fine beach sand that was all the way 4 feet down. Our fence has held up through some of the nastiest wind storms Lake Huron can throw at us.

 

[Ron6519]

The posts were set at 27 inches, not below the frost line. Way too shallow. I use gravel to set the posts so water drains away from the wood.
The issue is the post depth, though. Sorry, no easy fix. You will need to replace all the posts.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

What kind of fence is it? If it is wooden post, concrete isn't a good idea - it just holds the moisture against the post and accelerates rot. Probably not a problem right now but it eventually will be. If you're fixing things, might want to fix this too.

The best fix is to dig deeper and reset the posts. Put a shovel full of gravel in the bottom of the hole, place the post on it, backfill with sand or sharp stone and tamp it in.

 

[kaare]

Hi, thanks for all the suggestions

Apparently I still can't post links, but try this:


imgur . com /a/
(disregard)
PEVRW

I'm actually situated in Denmark, so there's no frost-line to consider.

There's 25 posts in total, of which at least 20 are leaning to some extent. It actually took us a solid week, 2-3 people working during the summer holiday to put it up, so digging everything up, extending the holes and redoing it is probably not our first resort - especially since the majority of the sections have not been attached to the posts with disassembling in mind...

Digging down around the posts and increasing the amount of concrete is probably feasible, does anyone have any idea if that would do anything for us? The two outermost posts (closest in one of the pictures) seem to have held up, and they got twice the concrete.

I know I'm fishing for an easy way out, but thanks for reading anyway

 

[Ron6519]

So the issue isn't frost heaving, just lateral support. How high is the fence? Is it open or solid? How much wind do you get? A high solid fence will be subjected to more lateral pressure then a low open one. A 6 foot high fence should have at least 36" deep posts, surrounded by gravel. If the soil is soft/wet a lot of the time I don't think more concrete will do the job.
The problem is a lack of post depth.