Restoring a Drainage Ditch to solve backyard flooding

this is sean with gate city foundation drainage jeremy and i are on a job today in colfax so let's take a look at what we got going on here we have got this little swale this drainage ditch up here this little swale here and then it goes down between these two properties and so according to the homeowner this used to be a ditch and the water stayed inside the ditch now what's happening is the water comes rushing through here and it skips over and out of the ditch once it skips through here it just like washes away all of his plantings all his ground cover all that stuff and so if we continue down here you can see the whole now the ditch pretty much the water is going to stay in the ditch but what happens here is a round in here somewhere it skips out of the ditch again and it like just like bee lines straight for his shed right there and so the way this is supposed to work is the water comes through here and then there's another kind of a ditch right here and let's see the water runs along the fence here runs along the fence here and this is all washing out and hollowing out because the water comes screaming down through here and then it's supposed to go into this culvert and so according to the homeowner this just like turns into a huge pond right here and this homeowner too has problems so this may be my this may be my best example of customers working together i've got three neighbors who are all paying for this solution so we're going to add this guy in right here and what we're going to do here is there's our our drainage ditch we're going to muck it out and we're going to create a swale across this customer's yard straight down to the creek right here and so instead of trying to get this water to make this hard 90 go all the way down there and then make its way into that culvert and go across here we're just going to take the water straight across so we've got the concrete buggy and a small mini excavator here today with a ditching bucket and we're going to clean all this out i'm hoping i can swing enough that i can get the dirt in the concrete buggy and jeremy can run it along and dump it off somewhere so that's what we're working on today take a look at this video that the homeowner sent me now i have slowed this way way down so you can see this is the customer's backyard and this river of water is coming out of that drainage ditch and so now we speed it back up and you can see it going down the road here and you can see the shed the red shed back there for a point of reference and this water is coming on down into this culvert here and so this is the water we're trying to keep in the ditch yeah it looks lined up [Music] [Music] the only reason i'm able to even do this job is that i have this little tiny mini excavator here and this thing will pull the tracks in so what you do is you lift the machine up with the blade and the bucket there and then you push a lever and that will pull the tracks right in and so this thing can get skinny on you and fit into tighter spaces to solve this problem what i'm proposing to do here is to use my 36 inch mucking or ditching bucket and simply bringing this ditch back down to grade and so you want this ditch lower than the surrounding side areas because you want the water to stay in there and if you look at that fence post on the right what's been happening is when the water comes rushing in there it's just been washing away right there so i put a couple of scoops on that side for the neighbor but some other companies wanted to come in here and fill this this area full of rip-rap rock and the homeowner asked me about that he said why wouldn't you want to do rip wrap and the reason you would not want to do rip wrap here is because it's very very very flat and so if if you filled this this thing up with riprap you would just be creating way more of a problem first of all because the riprap slows the water down you don't want to slow the water down in this instance you want to keep the water moving you want to keep it in the ditch and keep it moving and so the homeowner thought about that for a minute on site and he said that that made sense to him and for less than the price of the rip-rap we got this job done and wait till you see the after footage of this that the homeowner just sent me so for now we're just basically i'm having to use the slew function on the on the excavator which i'm still not very good at running it but i'm just going to muck this thing out the whole way down [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] in addition to digging the ditch down we wanted to build up the berm and restore the berm in those two problem areas the one was right next to his garden his vegetable garden and so that's what i'm doing here i'm just taking the dirt and dropping it on the other side there and jeremy and i are gonna basically pack it in and see didn't draw it and so we're taking the ditch down and we're trying to build this berm back up and restore it so that the water stays in the in the ditch even better and that worked out really well as you'll see coming up here shortly [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey buddy the problem i'm running into right now is i'm getting a little bit more of a slope that's here and i've got this southern magnolia leaves on here which are really slippery so i'm sliding around a little bit we are making pretty good progress here the homeowner just stopped by and gave us the big old thumbs up so he's pretty happy it's it's really tight right here so i'm kind of stuck in here now of course i can climb all over here and get out of here but we ran out of places he wanted some dirt over there by the building and then over there past the bee hives and so now jeremy's filling up the dump trailer so it's kind of slow going for now i'm just kind of hanging out but we don't have far to go and i talked to this homeowner and they're good to go so we're going to just kind of cut a little swale across there and probably dump the dirt in the ditch there in the gully and we'll be in really good shape so i think i forgot to mention the homeowner's been battling i guess with the hoa they they say they don't own this but then on the deed it says they do and so a lot of problems with drainage people people don't want to take the responsibility for it so like i said this homeowner this homeowner and this one back in the corner here are all going in together to get this done and the main reason of course this guy is the one that's getting all the water his all his planting area and stuff is just like running a river across there so you can see he's got some fruit trees he's got some bees he's got some these are blackberries right here he's got some squash up there so he he takes pride in his yard and everything and he doesn't need this water running across it all the time oh he's got some chickens right there too so we're getting this done today come uh i say cool so [Music] i just finished digging this little swale out right here so this look right now it looks like a ditch so watch this [Music] all right so i just tracked over that a little bit so it looks a lot better now it looks more like a just a a natural swale in the in the land so we're gonna get this seated and strawed i wanted to show you also the ditch here this is looking really good and there's so much water that comes through here i'm not really too worried about it we left all this loose stuff along the edges here and what's gonna happen is this is gonna just kind of fill itself in and level itself back out with the water the homeowner is fine we're going to seed and straw just for the heck of it but the homeowner is fine with this just kind of turning back into whatever it was he said that there wasn't really any standing water in here so like low areas like this if there was a lot of staining water in here i would try to get this a little bit flatter but it should it should wear itself in pretty quick okay the last thing i want to do here is this little swale here comes down and it kind of smacks into this and it's been gouging that out so i just want to take a couple of scoops actually take them over here and put them here and try to get this directed a little bit better into here so other companies wanted to put riprap in here and this is so flat here that you don't want to use rip wrap because rip wrap is used to slow the water down and so here in this instance you don't want to slow the water down you want the water to keep going and stay in the ditch and the homeowner asked me about why would you not want to put riprap in here and that's what i told him and he was very satisfied with that and i see it all the time companies dump rip rap in somewhere and call it a drainage solution so this is going to work really well for keeping the water in the ditch and out of his backyard we also placed some of the dirt along the fence in some of the worst areas to make a berm so we tried to re-establish the berm that used to be there so the homeowner was really happy about that too not only did we take this down but we brought this back up i just opened this up a little bit i took some of this dirt right here and grass and put it right there and so now we have a little bit more of a contiguous channel here hopefully heading on down the way so jeremy's back there seating and strawing getting everything raked out and i think we've got seat over here so we're ready to straw so this job is coming right along when we load up the dump trailer with the concrete buggy it pretty much puts it all in the front so you can see this truck is squatting down pretty bad so i want to add some weight to the back of the dump trailer here so check out how i'm going to do that come on all right i just moved that dirt back a little bit and the truck is sitting a lot better now so it'll pull down the road a whole lot better for jeremy check out this video that the homeowner just sent me here you can see the beginning of our ditch where we reshaped it to get the water to aim into the ditch and not hit that fence post and that's exactly what it's doing so that looks really good right there continuing on the water's moving really fast which is what we wanted and that fast moving water will keep the ditch clean so here you are at the magnolia same thing you can see the water's moving pretty quickly through there now here i slowed this way down this is that culvert in the side of the backyard and there's no water in there so this really right here is the money shot of this whole project look at the this is the backyard where that river was going across and there's no water anymore so this is money right here we kept all the water in the ditch and the homeowner is super happy about it check this out no water coming across the backyard anymore it's all staying there in the ditch that we mucked out and then back continuing on the ditch and that water is on down the way

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 169,656

Keywords: Greensboro drainage work, Greensboro drainage solution, backyard flooding problems, drainage problems, backyard drainage, mucking out drainage ditch, drainage ditch, gate city foundation drainage, French drain alternative, do I need a French drain, neighbors house flooding, water from neighbor flooding, Satisfying construction job, satisfying asmr construction, satisfying drainage solution

Id: ZW3Vib6XQvY

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021