How Erosion Can Halt Your Construction Site: Tips for Prevention

Erosion can be a major problem on the job site. What causes it? And what can you do to prevent it? There are several measures you can take.

We’re going to show you all about those preventative measures—and we’re also going to talk a little bit about our GABION line of tools. These are hog ring tools designed not only for agricultural use but also to help you maximize efficiency by building quick erosion control measures on the job site.

What Causes Construction Site Erosion?

Construction sites are notorious for erosion—and the primary reason why is because you’re usually working in a zone with bare earth. No grass, groundcovers, or foliage of any type will lead to soil that washes away in the rain or that blows away in the wind.

Most of the time, the soil is left bare because it’s been recently contoured to create a beautiful backyard or green zone, or because the job site required extensive excavation to lay pipes, build basements, and pour foundations. Even when none of those things are true, and you can go into a job site without removing the grass and foliage covering the soil, you’ll likely end up with erosion just from traffic. Trucks and equipment repeatedly driving over the grass will lead to bare patches (or ruts, if the ground is wet), and that will lead to erosion, as well.

What’s more, whether the job site has been contoured and excavated or not, you will need to bring trucks and equipment into the area to drop off supplies and do certain jobs. Thus, it almost never makes sense to call in the landscapers early on to plant grass and other groundcovers that can control erosion.

Preventing Erosion on the Jobsite

Fortunately, even when you can’t plant grass or other vegetation right away, there are measures you can take to prevent erosion on the job site. For example, careful scheduling can go a long way toward erosion prevention. Try to schedule excavations and contouring for times of the year when it won’t be as rainy since rain is the largest cause of erosion. You can also schedule jobs in phases with erosion in mind so that you can get grass and vegetation growing in certain areas of the job site as each phase concludes as opposed to leaving the whole job site bare for the duration of the project.

Sometimes scheduling around weather or different construction phases isn’t feasible—and that’s when you need to fall back on more hands-on erosion control methods. For instance, you can install silt fences at the bottom of low slopes to capture small amounts of runoff.

In more extreme cases, you’ll need to construct larger erosion control barriers—particularly on steep slopes, slopes that could be in danger of crumbling, or when you’re working during extremely wet periods where excessive rainfall could lead to excessive erosion. For these cases, try some of these solutions:

• Build retaining walls with fitted concrete blocks or precast concrete filled with granular earth to hold soil in place.
• Various types of membranes and timber mats can be used to control soil erosion in roadways or to prevent streams from widening and deepening due to erosion.
• Install French drains horizontally along slopes to capture water and direct it away before it can wash soil and silt to the bottom of the slope.
• Use riprap to build walls or cover slopes to prevent large scale erosion.

Using GABION Hog Ring Tools to Build Erosion Control Methods

When you need to build out erosion control measures to protect the soil around a jobsite, GABION Ringers can help. These tools are ideal for building riprap walls. Once you have fences in place and filled with stone aggregate, use GABION tools to fasten fences in place with hog rings.

Depending on your needs, there are two types of GABION tools. For smaller jobs, use the FM CL45 GABION Hog Ring Plier. These will let you install heavy duty 11g rings with ease manually. if you have a bigger job, or if your line of work calls for installing riprap and other erosion control methods often, try the air-driven F CL45A GABION Plier. This tool makes it easy to install rings much faster!

To learn more about these two tools, follow the link below and watch the video, where you’ll get a chance to see them in action.