Refrigerator root cellar resurrection
An upcoming carrot harvest
pushed us into fixing the refrigerator
root cellar today.
It took some digging and
prying, but it's now sitting up straight.
Next we need to figure out a
way to anchor it in place and then build a roof that will divert the
water. The parsnips from 2009 were nowhere to be found.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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A roof might help with water falling directly in from the sky, but if there's groundwater penetrating, or runoff from the surrounding higher ground, you'll still have water, and I don't know of an easy way to prevent that issue, and it can get sneaky. Don't know how often you were checking out your root cellar, but I can imagine a scenario where the fridge was slowly starting to rotate forward and the big rainstorm was just the last of a line of smaller movements that led to the collapse.
Rather than go up, I'd think about a solution below, or maybe even to the sides. A pseudo-foundation could work, even as simple as bolting the back of the fridge down to a sturdy piece of plywood set on concrete blocks sunk into the clay. You could also make wider fins and engage the soil to each side of the fridge.
Or you could use anchors.
Hmmm... maybe an email with some sketches is in order...