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Background:

The soil in our locality is/was Black Cotton Soil - mostly from weathered humus over the years. Our locality was also mostly large (by Indian standards) plots mostly with load-bearing walls - so there plenty of houses had enormous trees/gardens/what-not.

Over the last decade or two - the old load-bearing houses with clay-tile roofs have been replaced by multi-storey concrete column/beam apartments.

The result is drier soil ( we hit 46C regularly in summer for upto 3 weeks this part of the world ) in those parts of the locality that have not been concreted/asphalted over by construction/roads during the dry part of the year. The converse is true during the wet part of the year - extreme waterlogging is observed. Larger trees survive - smaller plants do not... or barely so.

I suspect this may be due to a double-whammy - greater sewage, and greater run-off after rain due to the soil excavated to accommodate concrete, smaller number of trees/roots to absorb moisture & retard soil runoff.

What are the expected changes in the water-table of a locality post "evolution" to a concrete column/beam structure?

Everyone
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  • Can you provide some more detail about what the actual problem is that you're trying to solve? What specific changes in the water table have you observed during this period? And is there some reason you keep specifying "load-bearing" when talking about the older houses? Any structure has load-bearing walls, do you actually mean for example that the older houses had green roofs to mitigate runoff? –  Feb 11 '16 at 18:16
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    I think it fits within 'Landscaping'. I see the question to be about landscape drainage. Rainwater that used to be distributed over an area A is now diverted into a smaller area a<A. Basic landscaping issue, is it not? –  Feb 11 '16 at 18:58
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    sounds like a soil engineering question. –  Feb 11 '16 at 22:37

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