Dirt/silt control

[random]

My "driveway" - the area from my road to the garage entrance - is rather badly designed. The road is higher than the foundation so it slopes toward the house. As a result I get a lot of water pooling at the garage door and front of the house.

The water is relatively easy to deal with - this spring I'm putting in some drainage, basically a french drain that will lead off into the yard where it's lower.

But along with the water comes a lot of mud and silt. This is going to clog the drainage, I'm sure, so I want to figure out how to keep it out. Anyone dealt with something like this?

This season's mud pile up:

End of the walkway - you can see the pavers off to the right, and how it got covered by silt.

 

[RCW]

Deal with it in reverse. Driveway slopes down to road. For years had to shovel my driveway material out of the road back into my driveway.

I try to put some swales in the driveway "cross-wise" to the slope to cut water off. That way it doesn't all run downhill.

What I've done is just a simple "cut" with a subsoiler at strategic angles. A pipe-and-stone drainage structure could get plugged as you say. I also only have a couple inches to work with, so a pipe/stone structure doesn't have enough elevation to daylight.

I have to re-do them every couple years. But as long as I have a half-inch or so in my "slits", they shield the sheet-flow from washing my driveway out into the road.

 

[Henro]

My "driveway" - the area from my road to the garage entrance - is rather badly designed. The road is higher than the foundation so it slopes toward the house. As a result I get a lot of water pooling at the garage door and front of the house.

The water is relatively easy to deal with - this spring I'm putting in some drainage, basically a french drain that will lead off into the yard where it's lower.

But along with the water comes a lot of mud and silt. This is going to clog the drainage, I'm sure, so I want to figure out how to keep it out. Anyone dealt with something like this?

This season's mud pile up:

[snipped photos]

End of the walkway - you can see the pavers off to the right, and how it got covered by silt.

Could you change the contour of the driveway so it dips a little before it reaches the house, and drains naturally from that dip to the lower area in the yard you mentioned?

If possible, that is what I would try. BUT I'm only using my imagination, as what you are dealing with overall is not obvious from your photos.

 

[NCL4701]

I don’t know how long your driveway is. If it’s about 30’ long, just ignore this whole post.

Pics are just to kind of show what I deal with at our place. Private road about 350 yards long with a hill crest 50 yards from the public road and 300 yards downhill to the end of the road with the hill continuing past the road. Point being it’s long and a lot of downhill so by the time water has run in the old worn in wheel tracks several hundred feet it’s moving fast and causing all sorts of erosion. It was good for almost 30 years with little work but had to do a pretty good overhaul last year.

With large quantities water inevitably running downhill there were a few principles important to controlling the water and erosion. All of them are about getting the water off the road and dispersed before enough of it can get together to cause damage. First, either crown or slope the whole thing to one side so much of the water is running off the side into a ditch. Ours is crowned. That keeps water from washing straight down the road but then you have a bunch of water running down a ditch toward your house. For that, our road requires turnouts. Basically the ditch stops and takes a turn out to the side to dump the water well away from the road. The ditch parallel to the road starts again a few feet later. Due to the length of the road, we have several. You probably need a ditch or two and at least one turnout before the water gets to your house. As Henro suggested if it’s practical to move the low point in the drive away from the house and put a swale or ditch type turnout at the low point that would be ideal.

Rock: If you’re having velocity erosion in ditches or turnouts, some larger rock such as rip rap or even some smaller rock will slow it down and stop that. It doesn’t take a lot. For the road itself, if you have a decent base already, something like #57 3/4” washed gravel should keep silt and mud from washing from your driveway to your house or anywhere else. If you don’t have a decent base, grade out the dirt into the right shape, start with some A, B, C crush/run on top of that so you’ll have the rock dust binder you need for a base. Then the gravel on top of that. You really shouldn’t have silt running down your driveway if your ditches are set up right and you have rock applied appropriately to prevent erosion. Biggest problem with rock is it ain’t free.

We also have a bunch of trails all over the place here so road maintenance seems to be one of our more necessary routine activities.

Edited to add pics of a couple of the turnouts. In our case the just run out into the woods. If running into a yard you might want to make them more of a swale to keep them more attractive.

 

[random]

Good point about the pics, here's a full view:

The ROAD is a mile long. It heads out from here to the highway, in the direction the truck is facing. About 100' in front of the truck it's around 18" higher than it is where you see here, and from the edge near the fence line to the house it drops about a foot, with the worst of that drop being in the last 10 feet or so.

I HAD thought of digging the whole thing up, to make it level with the foundation and sloping away, then going up onto the road proper, putting the drainage at the lowest spot. But I'm a bit reluctant to do that mainly because the ground that's there is packed really hard and is almost as solid as asphalt at this point - I would hate to lose that sort of a surface for my cars.

 

[NCL4701]

Good point about the pics, here's a full view:

View attachment 56044

The ROAD is a mile long. It heads out from here to the highway, in the direction the truck is facing. About 100' in front of the truck it's around 18" higher than it is where you see here, and from the edge near the fence line to the house it drops about a foot, with the worst of that drop being in the last 10 feet or so.

I HAD thought of digging the whole thing up, to make it level with the foundation and sloping away, then going up onto the road proper, putting the drainage at the lowest spot. But I'm a bit reluctant to do that mainly because the ground that's there is packed really hard and is almost as solid as asphalt at this point - I would hate to lose that sort of a surface for my cars.

Maybe I’m not looking at it right but it looks like the road is sloped the wrong way going into that curve and would work a lot better if it was sloped toward the field, dumping water into the ditch running along the field edge instead of aiming it at your house. Of course if you don’t happen to own the road not much you can do with that. If it’s a public road you could ask the DOT District Engineer to fix that but you’d probably have better odds getting results sending your request to Santa than you would asking NCDOT.

If you can’t reverse the road slope, seems like your best plan to redirect water might be to put a swale across the drive to direct the water away from the house. The more parallel to the natural water flow, the less of a swale needed.

Since the dirt is packed enough to be a decent base, putting a few inches of gravel over the rest of the drive would likely help quite a bit with your silt issue. Being you’re planning to put a drain in front of the garage a couple of inches of gravel over your whole drive up to the road may be sufficient to take care of the silt making to the house and the drain (once you get it in).

I would definitely agree disturbing the packed soil any more than necessary would be undesirable. I’d lean toward just putting in a couple inches of gravel over the whole drive when you put in the drain and add a swale later if necessary.

With the pics, maybe others have a better idea.

 

[random]

Thanks for that, didn't even think about the road. It's all mine so I can do whatever I want.

Here's another view, looking straight down the road.

I think that bears out what you were saying about the slope, and you can see the erosion where a lot of the muck is coming from.

There's no ditch along the field, but that can be changed. Given it continues to slope downward from where I took the pic (continuing that way behind me), off into the woods, that suggests a place to direct the water. I'll have to figure out how to build up that middle a bit while I'm at it, but I think your suggestion helps!

 

[NCL4701]

Thanks for that, didn't even think about the road. It's all mine so I can do whatever I want.

Here's another view, looking straight down the road. View attachment 56087
I think that bears out what you were saying about the slope, and you can see the erosion where a lot of the muck is coming from.

There's no ditch along the field, but that can be changed. Given it continues to slope downward from where I took the pic (continuing that way behind me), off into the woods, that suggests a place to direct the water. I'll have to figure out how to build up that middle a bit while I'm at it, but I think your suggestion helps!

I think a dry day with a box blade you could do a lot of good without spending any money, and if that doesn’t fully address it a load or two of strategically placed gravel should totally stop the silting. Nice place you have there. Good luck with it!

 

[RCW]

NCL4701 has some great suggestions.

This won’t show well, but beyond the box blade is a swale in the lawn heading right.

The BB sits in a high area that sheets water toward the garage, but everything runs under the truck toward the lawn. The road access is just behind the truck, and downhill about 40’.

It needs more work as some does run down the driveway just behind my bumper, but I’m catching most of it.

Most of that was done with some seat time and the box blade, with about 5 yards of fill where the box sits

This was a flooding rain a couple years ago before I made the last changes. You can see water running under the truck to the lawn, but still had quite a bit running down driveway.

 

[random]

I think a dry day with a box blade you could do a lot of good without spending any money, and if that doesn’t fully address it a load or two of strategically placed gravel should totally stop the silting. Nice place you have there. Good luck with it!

Except that I don't have a box blade (or even a grading blade) so there's money spent there...

Looking around to determine what exactly I want to get now