Brookhaven has a water problem, and it is not really about rainfall

Nancy Creek and Peachtree Creek both run through Brookhaven, and the upper Nancy Creek watershed, about 12,300 acres shared with Dunwoody, Chamblee, Doraville and Sandy Springs, is roughly 38 percent impervious on the Brookhaven side. Streams start to degrade at around 25 percent. The city’s own watershed work has listed streambank erosion causing property loss as one of its top three problems, and Murphey Candler Lake carries the sediment and bacteria that come with it.

What that means at the level of one back yard is simple. The rain has not changed. The number of roofs, driveways and patios it lands on has. Water that used to soak into the ground over a few hours now arrives at the bottom of your lot in twenty minutes, and it arrives with everybody else’s.

You see it most clearly in the neighbourhoods that have turned over: Drew Valley, Ashford Park, Brookhaven Fields, Lynwood Park. Streets of 1940s and 50s cottages on lots around 13,000 square feet, being replaced one at a time by houses with twice the roof area and a wider driveway. If your neighbour rebuilt last year and your side yard has been wet ever since, that is not a coincidence, and it is the single most common call we take in this city.

Call (404) 369-0989 or book a free site visit. Drainage is quoted after we have watched where the water actually goes.

What we install

French drains. A trench, a bed of open-graded stone, a perforated pipe wrapped and sleeved so the clay never silts it up, and filter fabric between the stone and the soil. The detail that decides whether it works for twenty years or two is fabric and stone size, not the pipe. Our full method is on the French drain installation page.

Interceptor drains along a property line. The fix when the water is arriving from uphill rather than falling on you. It catches the sheet flow before it reaches the house and carries it around.

Downspout collection. Roof water is the cheapest big win in Brookhaven. Every downspout tied into solid pipe and taken to daylight well away from the foundation, instead of dumped at the corner of the house where it has been eroding a channel for fifteen years.

Catch basins and area drains. For the low corner that will always be the low corner, and for the bottom of a driveway that funnels water at the garage.

Dry creek beds. A stone channel that carries a storm surge on the surface and looks like part of the garden the rest of the year. On the right lot it does the work of a pipe and costs less to maintain.

Regrading and slope repair. When the ground itself falls toward the house, no pipe fixes it. Sometimes the answer is a terrace or a wall, which is on the Brookhaven retaining walls page.

Why red clay makes it worse here than it sounds

The soil under Brookhaven is the Cecil series, a thin sandy topsoil over deep red clay heavy with kaolinite and mica. A century of erosion has scraped the topsoil off a lot of these lots and left the subsoil close to the surface. Clay does not absorb much and it recovers badly from compaction, so once a yard has been driven on by construction equipment, and in a teardown neighbourhood most of them have, infiltration drops for years.

That is why the standard advice of just regrade it often fails in Brookhaven. There is nowhere for the water to go down into. It has to be moved sideways, deliberately, to a place where releasing it does no harm to you, your neighbour or the creek.

Where the water is allowed to end up

This is the part most people never think about until a drain has already been dug in the wrong direction. You cannot solve your yard by concentrating water onto the property next door, and near a creek you cannot discharge wherever you like. Brookhaven has active watershed and stream buffer rules, and the whole city drains into Nancy Creek, Peachtree Creek and eventually the Chattahoochee.

Trees complicate it too. Brookhaven requires a permit to remove any tree four inches in diameter or larger, one of the strictest thresholds in metro Atlanta, and it employs three full-time city arborists. Trenching through a root plate can kill a tree slowly enough that nobody connects the two events, so we route drains around root zones, hand-dig where we must, and where the trench has to pass close we keep it shallow and narrow.

We work out the outlet before we quote the trench. If there is no legal or sensible place to daylight the water, we will tell you that at the site visit rather than after the invoice.

A quiet dig, and a lot that holds more water than it did

Our excavation and trenching equipment is battery powered, charged from a solar trailer. Drainage work is the least glamorous thing we do and the loudest place to arrive with a diesel engine, since it is a week of digging in a residential back yard within earshot of every neighbour. Brookhaven’s noise ordinance bars landscaping and yard equipment between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., and before 9 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, and we work well inside it.

There is a sustainability argument for doing this properly that goes beyond the equipment. In a watershed already 38 percent impervious, the responsible fix is not simply to pipe your problem to the street faster. Where the lot allows it we build in places for water to sit and soak, a dry creek bed with a stone reservoir, a rain garden planted with river oats, Joe-pye weed and winterberry, permeable surfaces instead of solid ones. It costs about the same, and it takes load off the creek rather than adding to it.

Questions Brookhaven homeowners ask us about drainage

My back yard floods since my neighbour rebuilt. What can I do? Practically, the fix on your own land is usually an interceptor French drain along the property line taken to a discharge point downhill, sometimes with a catch basin at the wettest spot. We start there because it is inside your control. What your neighbour was required to do about stormwater when they built is a question for the city.

Do I need a permit for drainage work in Brookhaven? A straightforward French drain or downspout run generally does not. What can require review is significant grading, work inside a stream buffer, or anything that means removing a tree four inches in diameter or larger, which does need a permit here. We check before we dig.

How long will a French drain last in Brookhaven clay? Built with washed open-graded stone, a sleeved pipe and fabric between the stone and the clay, decades. Built without the fabric, a few years, because red clay silts the stone bed solid and the whole thing quietly stops working while looking fine from above.

Can water just go into the street or the storm drain? Sometimes, and it depends on where your lot sits and what the city allows at that point. It is one of the first things we establish, because the outlet determines the whole design.

Will you tear up my whole yard? Trenching leaves a visible line for a season. We cut and lift sod where we can and put it back, and reseed or re-sod what cannot be saved. By the second mow most people cannot find the trench.

Is a dry creek bed just decorative? Not if it is built right. It is a surface channel sized for a real storm, with stone and fabric underneath. It also gives us somewhere to plant, and it needs no maintenance beyond pulling the odd weed.

My crawl space is damp. Is that a drainage job? Often it starts as one. Roof water and surface water hitting the foundation are the usual cause, and fixing those is the cheapest first move. If there is a waterproofing problem below grade as well, that is a different trade and we will say so.

What does drainage work cost in Brookhaven? It depends on trench length and depth, how far the outlet is, what has to be crossed, and whether regrading is involved. We do not publish numbers because two yards on the same street can differ by a factor of three. The site visit is free and you get a written scope.

Nearby

Brookhaven is about ten minutes down Ashford-Dunwoody Road from our base. Everything else we do in the city is on the Brookhaven page. The same water runs through Chamblee, where Nancy Creek and Bubbling Creek begin, and through Dunwoody, where Perimeter Creek starts, and we handle it in Dunwoody, Doraville, Sandy Springs and Peachtree Corners too. Grading, erosion control and the wider drainage picture are on the drainage, French drains and grading page. Client comments are on the reviews page.

Book a site visit

The useful time to call about drainage is while it is still wet, because that is when we can see it. (404) 369-0989 · book a free site visit. Every drainage job is priced after that visit, in writing, with the outlet and the depth spelled out.