When we moved in the house, we had a small valley through our backyard that water flowed from the top of the neighborhood through our yard.
We wanted to install a pool, so they hired a contractor to put in a retaining wall and drainage (dry creek bed and catch basin (12×12)). Today we got the most amount of rain I have ever seen in a matter of minutes (2-3 inches). It filled out dry creek bed up and flowed over the wall. Not shown is later that wall collapsed in a section due to water build up it seems.
I truly don’t know if this problem can ever be solved seeing all that water. Just hoping to see if anyone thinks anything can be done. Feeling hopeless right now.
by Character_Sun_9922
17 Comments
Have you tried asking the sky gods to not rain there? Other then that idk
You need a landscape architect to draw up a new grading plan.
Looks like you need another retaining wall just for the stream..
Drainage. You might want to consider getting a crew to dig and install drainage. I had it done in 2 areas and those areas drain out to in front of my house in the street. Solved my issue.
Not sure where that is coming from? But yeah, even a pond with drainage might do the trick. That’s a lot of water obviously
Drainage, stone stream that will lead the flow of water and a pond? Try to use it for an interesting natural lanscaping and get some nice addition to the pool- with the help of architect with this scale of oveflowing problem.
Is it coming from your neighbor’s yard?
Take a look over your fence to where that water is coming from.
There may be an uphill neighbor whose roof drains are being directed to you.
Good luck—
Eek
You can do anything with time and money.
I’d start building an ark.
you need an excavator to cut in drainage swales in a long arc around the back your property, to catch and carry the water around the sides of the pool and house. Call an excavator, not an architect, and show him these vids. An architect is just going to charge you $10k to make a pretty picture and then he’ll call an excavator that you’ll have to pay anyway..
Dry creek bed. Np.
Could you get the creek cleared out with a machine ? , if possible do either side of your property as well. Also it would be worth trying your local authority environmental dept, or whoever is in charge of waterways (somebody will be ) and ask them to sort it out.
Edit to add …. Clearing where ever it is supposed to go would be the best way to start and then work towards the source.
Go fishing.
The dry creek bed and basins was the right approach…and from what I gather was working until you got this heavy rain. In my job I deal with this stuff all the time and our drainage engineer has to size inlets, pipes etc. based on the estimated rainfall in a given storm. These are rated as 3yr, 5yr, 25yr and even 100yr events. Also part of the equation is the area of ground, the type of soil, impervious area and the slopes of the terrain.
It looks to me like what you need is an actual ditch of a sizeable nature along your fence line to get that river flowing toward the front of the house. You have quite a bit of slope there too so to avoid erosion I would line it with rock or even pave the sides and bottom with concrete.
If you absolutely are opposed to a ditch then you likely need a concrete yard inlet close to the fence at the top (not your typical plastic 2×2, a type “C” or even a type “E” commercial concrete structure for this much water and a 24″ or greater concrete pipe down the fence line. For that to work however you may need to coordinate with the city to figure out where that actually goes. It will need an inlet to attach to which would likely be in the city right-of-way or some other larger outfall location like a creek or pond. This option would be hugely expensive by the way (think 100k or more).
Drainage runoff of this nature is taken care of on a macro level during subdivision design in my area so it hard to say how it gets dealt with after the fact for me.
EDIT: One last thing to note on your existing dry bed…it looks like the downhill side of the bed may not have been built up high enough. It might have held if it had more of a berm to redirect the flow down the hill rather than across to your wall.
hey, look at the bright side. at least they made the pool deck slope outwards from the edge so most of that brown piss water is not flowing into the pool
ETA: I looked closer and it does look like some of it is flowing into the pool unfortunately. still could be a lot worse, but that really sucks man. I don’t have anything really helpful to add that no one else has said, but best of luck to you.