Yard Drainage & Leveling in Nome, TX

Yard Leveling & Drainage Services in Nome, TX

Around Nome, the ground beside a house has often had another life first. A pipeline right of way runs along the back fence. An old lease road, built up a foot above the pasture, passes close to the yard. An old pad sits under the far end of the lawn. None of it shows up the way a fence does, and all of it decides where water goes and where a machine can safely dig. This page is about leveling and draining a house yard on that kind of ground: finding what is there, working with it, and getting rain off the lawn without cutting into somebody's pipe.

Nome sits on US 90 in the far western corner of Jefferson County, a few hundred people surrounded by a lot of land. It is farm and cattle country, and it is old oil country too. Production has run through this part of the county for a long time, and tracts around town carry its traces: lease roads, old pads, tank battery sites, spoil banks and pipeline right of way crossing otherwise ordinary pasture. Those features matter to a house yard in two ways. Built-up roads, pads and banks act as dams on ground this flat, so a yard on the upslope side of one can hold water for days behind it, especially where an old crossing has silted, crushed or was never put in. And pipelines, whether in service or not, run under ground that looks like lawn. Lowering the ground over a line reduces its cover and piling fill on it adds load, so neither is decided by eye. The soil is the heavy clay found across the county, and it takes in almost no water. Pine Island Bayou drains the country north of here along the Hardin County line on its way to the Neches, and the rest is a matter of inches of fall to road and field ditches. This stretch of the Gulf Coast gets around sixty inches of rain in a typical year, and Harvey and Imelda both moved enough water across the area to change how some properties drain.

The first walk is for what lies under and around the yard. 811 is called for the buried lines, and the yard is checked for pipeline markers, old pads and roads, and anything else the property's history may have left. Where a right of way crosses the work area, the operator is contacted before the job is planned. Pipeline companies set their own rules for grading over their lines, often including notice, limits on cutting or filling, and sometimes a representative on site while equipment works nearby. Those rules are followed, not guessed at. Then the levels get shot, including across any built-up feature near the yard. If a lease road or old pad is what holds water against the yard, the fix may be small: a culvert set at the right flowline through the road lets the yard drain and keeps the road usable. That is ditch and culvert work, quoted as such. If the road is no longer needed, a cut through it can do the same job, but on many tracts here the old road is still the best way around the property. Within the yard the work follows a familiar order. The ground beside the slab is built up and shaped so water leaves the house on every side, with the finished grade kept below the weep holes and siding. Low spots are filled with clay in thin compacted lifts and capped with topsoil. The yard falls continuously toward its outlet, whether a road ditch, a field ditch or a swale running out to the pasture, without sending water onto a neighbor. Old pad material under a lawn rarely behaves like the native clay around it. Where it causes a soft spot or a hump, it is dug out to firm ground and replaced, and anything that has to leave is hauled away. Old tank battery and pad sites can also leave soil that looks or smells of oil. If any turns up during the work, it is not spread around the yard. Digging stops in that spot and you are told, so it can be dealt with properly before the job carries on. Drives out here are long and crossings are old, so the route for loaded trucks bringing fill and topsoil is checked before delivery. If the ground is too soft, the load is staged at the road or the job waits for drier weather.