Cutting a swale to relieve driveway and crawlspace flooding

this is shawn with gate city foundation drainage we are on a job today in jamestown so let's take a look at what we got going on here so this customer called me back in november back before my youtube channel blew up and he wanted so first of all what happens here is this gutter here and the driveway basically you get just a huge pond right here and we had a tiny little sprinkle this morning and you can see that the water holds right here and then it just builds up check out this video that the homeowner sent me here you can see that corner of the driveway and it's just completely underwater there if you look up the hill here you can see one of the major components here is the downspout from the neighbor so that's adding quite a bit of water to this area as well and the point is once the water gets to that area around the driveway and here's a good look at it now that the tree right there that has been removed so you'll see that and then look at the trash cans there that's another good landmark for you to see all the water under the trash cans all this water is hanging up against the house up against the crawl space and that's why the homeowner called me and so here you can see that there's a little bit of a swale already in the land and so we're gonna dig that swale out and throw it up against the foundation here you can see how green it is under that foundation vent well and that's just standing water right there up against the crawl and so he had talked to me about trying to do a pipe across here in a french drain the problem with that let's take a look if we did anything with a pipe there is nowhere to discharge the pipe so i basically told the homeowner you know i said i don't feel comfortable having a pipe come out somewhere right here and just like boom aiming at the neighbors and so instead of a pipe what we're going to be doing here is we're going to be doing just basically following this little swale so take a look we've already got this little swale right here and we're just going to continue it out to the driveway a couple things since i've been since i was here in november he had a tree right here that was taken out and either when they ground the stump or when they took the tree out they cut the north state the internet line and so the homeowner luckily had the foresight to take this temporary line and tell north state don't bury it yet because i've got more work going on so this line here is the old one that one's not in usage this red is is power that's going to be real deep so all we're going to do here we're going to scalp this down a little bit and then hook on to our existing swale so that's what we're working on on this side now the customer did contact me back and asked me to extend out so he did have some corrugated pipes across here that's them right there and what's been happening you can you can kind of see is all his mulch just washes away and so we're just going to extend the pipe to right here where it used to extend to and so they talked to the neighbor there's no problem there so just this we're going to end it right here and again we're kind of going toward the neighbor but it's not quite as bad as having a whole huge driveway and a big french drain and other pipes so that's what we're working on today i'm getting this fiber optics line out of the way so a good rule of thumb is don't cut the customers internet lines when stump grinders come through and grind away the stump they basically leave all the wood chips from the ground up stump there and so the first order of business here is to get rid of the wood chips because we need grout we need dirt here to be able to work on our swale and so i'm just gonna get these wood chips out of here and into the back of the dump truck so that's why i brought the dump truck over here today [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] all right so this job is changing a little bit because he took this tree out we want to move the swale over a little bit and we've got some more roots right here i just i've been chewing on this for a while i can't get it and he's got where the sun grinder came out this is all uneven right here and i've got a lot of sod mixed with dirt mixed with roots so what i'm going to do is i'm going to dump this right here and i'm going to go home and get my mini excavator with the root hook to pull these out and i'm going to get my harley rake so i'll be able to smooth all this out and it's just going to be a much better job so let me get that done real quickly and i'll dump this real quick go home and get that those other machines and i'll be right back over here [Music] [Music] so [Music] smile you are on shawn camp [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] and we are finished with this job so we got our swale cut it was quite tricky to get a continuous fall across there because it's pretty flat right here but the main thing is this water now has a place to escape to so we should be in really good shape we brought some of the dirt over here and and feathered out where this stump was got these the wood chips taken up and out of there because they'll just decay and cave in so the homeowner's pretty happy we should be in really good shape we're just getting loaded up over here and i wanted to show you the other side before we got too far here so we caught these two gutters here and we just took it right down to here so there's our outfall the homeowner wanted us to put some rip wrap around there to try to protect it and whatnot so that should be good this neighbor was fine with this discharging here it's far enough away from the house again we didn't want to discharge behind because it was aiming right at the house so i'd say we're in pretty good shape ready for rain we got everything seated and strawed and the homeowner asked us to seed and straw where we added that dirt in there up against the house and i can't remember if i showed you or not but we added some more dirt around here as well right along there so he asked us to do that as well so we got that done this is shawn it's been a couple of months since we were here last and we just had a really really big rainstorm so i wanted to come over here and see how this swale we did was doing so you can see there's no more standing water here and the water is pretty much heading on down the way now there is a little bit of standing water along here because this swell was really really tricky but it looks like we're going down on through here and the homeowner's really happy with it too so i've been waiting a while to get back over here this area is kind of deep right here there's a little bit of deeper water and then it looks like it goes up a little bit right there but we definitely got the water off the house let's take a look at the other outfall over here so that one's flowing pretty well as well all right

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 21,770

Rating: 4.9464288 out of 5

Keywords: flooding against foundation, creating a swale, driveway flooding, crawlspace flooding, french drain alternative, how to get water away from foundation

Id: 1jmIAZP0Q18

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021