Land Grading & Leveling in Silsbee, TX

Land Grading & Leveling Services in Silsbee, TX

A surprising number of wet areas on tracts here are sitting behind a railway embankment that stopped carrying trains eighty years ago and never stopped carrying water. We cut, fill and level ground across Silsbee and the surrounding parts of Hardin County. Free on-site estimate.

The timber era left this country laced with tram roads and rail spurs, and those were built to a standard. Raised grades, long straight alignments, cuts through rises, and crossings that were frequently trestles. A trestle rots away. The embankment does not. What is left across a great many tracts here is a long raised barrier with no functioning crossing in it, sitting square across the natural drainage. On ground that otherwise drains reasonably well, that produces a persistent wet area on the upslope side that has no natural explanation and that owners often assume is simply how the tract is. It is a good problem to find, because putting a properly sized crossing through at the correct flowline frequently drains ground that has been wet for generations, and that is a far smaller job than a regrade. The rest of the picture is standard for the uplands here. The soils drain better than the Gulf Coast clay to the south, so grading actually works, but they also erode once cover is off, and a channel with gradient on erodible soil cuts rather than drains. Village Creek runs south from here into the Neches. Harvey put it well out of its banks in 2017 and Imelda added to it, and the bottoms hold water long after the uplands drain. Hardin County and TCEQ rules govern any material cleared to open a path.

We walk the flow path and look specifically for old grades, because on tracts here they are the most common cause of an unexplained wet area. Where one is impounding water, the fix is a crossing at the correct flowline rather than a general regrade, and where the grade is worth keeping as access that keeps both. Where the problem is genuinely grade, the design principle here is to move water without accelerating it: gentle consistent gradient rather than steep sections, broad shallow profiles rather than narrow deep ones, and enough length to spread the fall. On erodible upland soil, concentrating flow produces a gully. The discharge point gets as much attention as the channel, because water released at speed onto bare ground starts a gully some distance from where anyone was looking and usually on somebody else's ground. Old skid trails get identified too. Harvest operations leave compacted linear features that channel water, and a fair number of erosion problems on cut-over tracts trace back to one nobody thinks about. We re-establish cover on disturbed ground rather than leaving it bare, because on this soil that is what stops the work being undone by the first heavy rain.