Yard Drainage & Leveling in Port Arthur, TX

Yard Leveling & Drainage Services in Port Arthur, TX

Dig a post hole in a Port Arthur yard in winter and there is a fair chance water seeps into the bottom before the post goes in. That is the water table, and on the lowest ground in the county it is never far down. It is also why the usual instinct about a wet yard, dig a ditch and give the water somewhere to go, so often fails here. The ditch fills from below and sits there as a long, narrow pond. Yard work on this ground runs the other way. Low spots are raised, the surface is shaped with gentle fall, and water is moved across the top to the street. This page explains how, and where the limits are.

Port Arthur sits on Sabine Lake and the Sabine-Neches Waterway at the southern end of Jefferson County, on ground lower than anywhere else we work. The city has taken Rita in 2005, Ike in 2008, Harvey in 2017, which flooded a very large part of it, and Imelda in 2019. Many neighborhoods now mix occupied houses with lots where a structure came down after one of those storms and nothing replaced it, and plenty of yards here have been built on, cleared and built on again. The soil is dense Gulf Coast clay and the land is close to flat. Rain cannot soak in, and with groundwater this shallow there is little room below the surface for it to go even where the clay is cracked. A yard here sheds water across its surface or holds it. Where the water goes after it leaves is the other half of the story. Yards empty into street ditches and the city and district system, and that system is under pressure in any big rain. When it is full, water backs up the ditches and stays in the yards until the system drains down. No grading on a private lot changes that. Surge has also pushed saltwater across a good deal of this ground more than once. Salt left in the soil slows the return of grass on bare, regraded ground, so new lawn here deserves a longer settling-in period before anyone judges the result.

Diagnosis comes first, because on this ground there are three different reasons a yard holds water and only two of them are fixed with dirt. We shoot the yard, the slab and the flowline of the street ditch, then look at what happens between them. A yard with no fall, or with hollows in it, is a grading job. A ditch or culvert at the front that is silted or crushed is a conveyance job, also ours. A system that is simply full during a storm is neither, and you are told that up front. Where grading is the answer, low spots are filled rather than drained. Sod comes up, compacted fill goes into the hollow in thin lifts, and topsoil goes on top so grass has a root zone above the wet clay. Raising the low places a few inches and blending them into the surrounding fall does more on this ground than any trench, because the water moves across the top where it was always going to move. Around the house, the ground beside the slab is built up so it falls away on every side, with the finished grade kept below the weep holes and siding. The rest of the yard gets a broad, gentle fall toward the street ditch or a side yard that reaches it. Where a defined path is needed, it is a wide, shallow swale rather than a ditch, wide enough to mow and shallow enough to stay above the water table. On lots that have been built on before, the low area is probed before it is filled. Old slab edges, footings and debris under a yard are common in this city, and fill placed over them settles unevenly. Anything buried in the work area is dug out and hauled off first. Timing matters more here than almost anywhere. With groundwater this shallow, a yard can stay too soft to carry a machine for long stretches of a wet winter, and clay worked while saturated will not compact; it smears and pumps instead. Work is planned for firmer ground, usually the drier months of late summer and fall, and a scheduled day is moved rather than spent rutting the lawn. Locates come first on every job. The city is threaded with pipeline and utility corridors, and the residential streets carry their own buried services, so 811 is called and private lines are found before the excavator touches the ground. The yard's water goes to the street, not onto the lot next door, including an empty one.