A Hole or Sunken Spot Opened Up in My Yard (Port Orchard, WA)

What usually causes sinkhole or sunken spot in Port Orchard

In Port Orchard we check a collapsed or separated drain line before anything else, because water surfacing at a neighbor's retaining wall is how it shows up here. Old clay tile or crushed corrugated pipe lets water wash soil into the pipe and away. Clay that moves on the Bay Street slopes makes the signs misleading, so we confirm rather than assume.

Next: poorly compacted backfill from an earlier dig. A trench that was dumped full and never compacted settles for years. With peat in the Long Lake bottoms under newer McCormick Woods lots with buried irrigation, the symptoms can look identical to the first cause, which is why the meter test and the locate matter.

And a leaking water service line washing out the trench: the most common cause on a sunken trench line. Less common on long rural driveways toward Sunnyslope, but we've found it near Long Lake.

First steps on a Port Orchard property

Port Orchard's steep downtown lots are where water surfaces farthest from the break; a leak at the top of a Bay Street hillside lot can show up at a retaining wall two houses down.

Do this before anyone digs outwash on the Sedgwick and Bethel flats in Port Orchard: keep everyone off it and mark it. Do the meter test. It takes minutes and it tells us whether the problem is on long rural driveways toward Sunnyslope or inside the house.

How we fix it

The repair side is underground water leak detection. On steep lots climbing from Sinclair Inlet that means repair, if you want us to, then confirm and mark in slick Kitsap Formation clay on the hillsides where the problem actually is, then correlate. If what we expose is PEX at insert fittings in McCormick Woods at the end of its life, we say so with the pipe in your hand.

From Long Lake to Bay Street and out around McCormick Woods, sinkhole or sunken spot is a regular Port Orchard call for us. A quick run across the Sinclair Inlet bridge, and emergencies on newer McCormick Woods lots with buried irrigation dispatch immediately, any hour.