- Joined
- Jul 22, 2016
Well look at it this way. I am on a nice hill in an area with moderate rainfall (for the UK) with good drainage in the ground for the water table.
My home's foundations are three feet thick at one end, going to six feet at the other to create a level base. (I'm on a slight hill). This give a nice, stable base for my home to be built on. This is also in a place with proper top soil, and other "grounding" which means the ground doesn't wash away in the rain.
La Zorra's current container is just dumped straight onto sand. There's a biblical story which tells you not to build your home straight onto the sand and it ain't no parable.
There's not much in the way of rainfall, but the fact there's creosote bushes there tells you there's some moisture about. A big hefty container like that on a sandy base with no support is probably going to shift slowly at first, but is likely to "go" quite badly if there's a rainfall. It will either sink into the sand, or move down the hill like the sailing stones in Death Valley.
The main problem will be weight, wherever the weight is is where the sinking is likely to occur. So a bunch of troons sleeping one side or another or at one end or another is going to shift the weight.
While I love the visual of the container sinking into the sand, it's not going to happen that way. I had a shipping container delivered to my house and we just picked a relatively level spot in the yard next to the $20k greenhouse for orchids and dumped it.
Now, what WILL probably happen, is that sand EROSION will happen from the wind. That area hasn't been packed like the area around my old house. And the wind and any rain will cause the loose topsoil to filter away. This will make the container list one way or another.
To fix this, they will have to move the container to a properly graded area that's at least a little more even and without all the loose sand, and preferably to at the minimum a short concrete block foundation or one built from railroad ties. It's one thing to dump something in the desert for storage. It's another thing to live in it. As they have started it, they won't ever be able to plumb it properly - not to hang a picture properly and not to get water inside.