Driveways & Gravel Roads in Sour Lake, TX

Driveways & Gravel Roads Services in Sour Lake, TX

There is a decent chance the best road material on your property is already there, in a lease road somebody built fifty years ago. Working out whether it is usable is the first thing we do on a drive job here. We cut, base and crown gravel drives and private roads across Sour Lake and the surrounding parts of Hardin County. Free on-site estimate.

Oil field roads were built to carry rigs and loaded trucks, which is a considerably heavier requirement than a residential drive. They were built up above grade, given a base, and drained. Decades later, a great many of them have closed in with brush and look like nothing at all from a distance. Underneath, the built-up profile and often a usable base are still there. Reopening one is frequently cheaper and produces a better road than building new alignment across raw ground. The qualification is that they were built for the traffic of the time and have had no maintenance since. The crown will have gone, the crossings will have silted or failed, and the base may have contamination or unsuitable material in it. So it is an opportunity to evaluate rather than a guaranteed shortcut. Where new alignment is needed, the ground behaves the way it does across this county. The clay does not drain, so water in a base has nowhere to go and stays until it evaporates, and stone gets pumped down into saturated clay under traffic. Around sixty inches of rain a year on this stretch of the Gulf Coast makes that continuous. Harvey and Imelda damaged crossings across this area, and Pine Island Bayou drains the country south and east of town.

We walk the whole alignment, including any old road corridor, and assess whether the existing profile is worth using. Where it is, the work is reopening the corridor, re-establishing the crown, replacing or clearing the crossings and topping the surface, which is a substantially smaller job than building new. Where new alignment is needed, the drive gets built from the bottom. Soft material comes out rather than being buried, the subgrade gets shaped so water leaves it, and where the ground will not hold, geotextile fabric between clay and base stops the two mixing. On long rural drives that fabric usually earns its place because the failure points are dispersed and awkward to return to. Base depth gets set against the actual traffic. Tell us if a lowboy, loaded trucks or equipment trailers use the drive, because building for a pickup and discovering the difference under a loaded trailer means building twice. Crossings get sized against the drainage area rather than matched to what is in there. On old roads the original pipe is frequently undersized for what the ground now drains, and it may be crushed. Hardin County requirements apply to approaches onto county roads. Easements and buried facilities get established before cutting, given the history here, and where brush along the alignment has to be dealt with, TCEQ outdoor burning rules and the current county ban position govern the material.