“With all of the rain this summer the clay soils simply cannot support the weight of the houses. A 3000 square foot house is sitting on a 1500 square foot footprint so it is almost double the weight of a smaller single story house with the same size footprint. The only thing worse would be another hurricane,” explained Martin Dawson, owner of Dawson Foundation Repair. “Last year Hurricane Harvey and the resulting flood waters saturated the clay soils in and around Houston. This year the heavy rains of summer, particularly August and September, have turned the clay soils into a sort of mush. It is like a precursor to soil liquefaction,” he stated.
Soil Liquefaction is an engineering term and is described in Wikipedia as: “Soil liquefaction occurs when a saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress such as shaking during an earthquake or other sudden change in stress condition, in which material that is ordinarily a solid behaves like a liquid.”