French Drain and Yard Drainage in Kilgore, Texas

A town built on top of an oil field

Kilgore was at the center of the boom that defined this part of Texas, and at its peak the town was famously crowded with derricks standing in the middle of the built up area. Decades of drilling, pad construction, tank batteries, pipelines and road building left behind imported fill, compacted work surfaces and altered grade throughout and around town. Later, houses were built on that ground.

For a homeowner, that history has a very practical consequence. Native East Texas upland soil is loamy and gravelly and takes water in at a reasonable rate. Heavily compacted fill does not. Water hits it and runs off or ponds on top of it, and a yard can stay wet even though the neighborhood is not particularly low. The soil map does not describe what is actually under a lot that was once a work area.

What that means for a French drain

Two things change on ground like this. First, the trench itself is slower and less predictable to dig. Compacted material, old gravel or caliche layers, chunks of concrete, buried pipe and abandoned utilities all turn up on older Kilgore lots, which is why utility locates and a few test holes before quoting are worth insisting on. Read more in the guide on drainage on old fill and compacted ground.

Second, the water behaves differently. On compacted ground the problem is usually surface water perched on top of a layer that will not accept it, so a shallow interception line and surface grading often do more good than a deep trench. The goal is to catch water while it is still on top and lead it away, not to try to drain a layer that was engineered to be impermeable in the first place.

Terrain around Kilgore

The ground here is generally the gently sloping to hilly upland typical of the East Texas timberlands, which is good news for outfall. Many Kilgore properties do have usable fall toward a street, ditch or lower area, so gravity systems are more often workable here than on the flat bottomland lots closer to the Sabine. The elevation still has to be measured rather than assumed, especially where old site work has flattened or reshaped a lot.

Older housing stock

Kilgore has a substantial amount of older housing, and older houses bring the usual companions: settled backfill, gutters that discharge at the slab, additions that changed the roof drainage pattern, and beds built up over the years until the grade tips toward the house. Correcting those basics and adding perimeter interception where water arrives from uphill handles a large share of Kilgore foundation moisture complaints.

Request quotes in Kilgore

Tell us where water stands, how old the house is, and whether you know anything about the site history. Requests are shared with independent contractors working in Kilgore and the surrounding Gregg County area.