Site Preparation in Beaumont, TX

About Site Preparation

Site preparation is the step where a piece of land stops being land and becomes a building site. It covers the clearing and grubbing, the cut and fill to get to the design elevation, the pad itself, and the drainage that keeps water off it. Two things make this work harder on the upper Gulf Coast than in most of the country. The first is the soil. The Beaumont Formation clay under most of Jefferson County and the southern part of Hardin and Orange counties is highly plastic. It swells when it takes on water and shrinks when it dries, and it does both a lot in a climate that runs sixty inches of rain a year with hard dry spells in between. Ground that moves is ground that cracks slabs, and the answer is a properly built and compacted pad rather than a slab poured on native grade. The second is elevation. This is flat country close to sea level, and a very large share of the buildable land in this market sits in or near a mapped floodplain. Harvey and Imelda both put water in structures that had never taken it before, and the practical consequence is that finished floor elevation is now the single most important number on a lot of these jobs. Building the pad to the right height is not an upgrade, it is the difference between an insurable structure and a claim. Grubbing is the part people try to save money on and should not. Organic material left in a pad, whether that is stumps, root balls or a buried brush windrow, rots. When it rots it leaves a void, and the pad settles into the void unevenly. That shows up two or three years after the slab is poured, which is long after everyone has forgotten who cleared the site. Where the water goes is the last piece, and it is not optional. A pad built without an outfall is a dam. On tracts that drain toward Pine Island Bayou, Taylor Bayou or the Neches, and inside the Jefferson County drainage district system, raising ground in one place moves water to another, and the neighbour downhill notices.