Low Ground and You Need a House Pad in Silsbee, TX

What to do right now

1. 1Get the 811 locate done before the footprint is stripped or a stump is pulled, and walk the road frontage for pipeline markers; if there is a marker, the operator hears from you before a bucket goes in near it. If the creek side of the tract is also the boundary, your surveyor settles where the line runs before a pad is shaped near it.
2. 2Check with Hardin County whether the site is in the mapped Village Creek floodplain and what finished floor elevation applies. If the answer changes where the house goes, better to learn it now.
3. 3Find out what the tract was before you owned it. A timber harvest date tells us how many stumps to expect, and a lot near the old mill or rail line tells us to probe for fill before quoting.
4. 4Walk the tract after a hard rain and mark the line where the ground goes from firm to soft. The house wants to be above that line, and the drive has to cross it somewhere that will carry a loaded truck.
5. 5List the trees you want to keep. The ones inside the footprint come out with their root plates, and the ones within a few feet of the pad edge are unlikely to survive it, so knowing your priorities lets the pad be sited around them where possible.

Why this happens in Silsbee, TX

Silsbee sits where the sandier Piney Woods soils of Hardin County take over from the coastal clay, on the southern edge of the Big Thicket, with Village Creek running south from town into the Neches. The land around it has been commercial timber for a century, so old skid trails, plantation rows and buried stump fields are under tracts that look untouched, and the ground near the old mill and rail line can hold fill nobody documented. Harvey and Imelda both flooded the creek corridor, the mapped floodplain follows it, and the bottomland can carry federal wetland jurisdiction on top of the county's elevation rules. Highway 96 makes the run from Beaumont short, and a dry week here often opens ground that is still too wet closer to the coast.