Some water problems outgrow gravel and perforated pipe. When an entire slope drains across your yard, when a ditch overtops the driveway every time it storms, when the volume moving through your property is measured in curb-loads rather than puddles — the fix is solid pipe with real capacity. That’s private storm drainage, and it’s the heavy end of what we build.
This page covers two kinds of that work: buried solid-pipe systems that move large volumes across residential lots, and the culverts that carry driveways over ditches and swales on rural and larger properties.
Why this isn’t a french drain job
A french drain collects groundwater slowly, through perforations, along its whole length. Storm drainage is the opposite assignment: capture a lot of surface water fast, in one or two places, and move it somewhere else before it floods. That means smooth-wall solid pipe sized for flow, with water entering through catch basins or channel drains rather than seeping in through the pipe walls.
The volumes involved surprise people. Because East Tennessee red clay absorbs so little, nearly everything that falls becomes runoff — a one-inch storm on a quarter-acre lot sheds several thousand gallons across the surface. And Knoxville’s ridge-and-valley terrain concentrates it: water off the ridges gathers speed and company on the way down, so the low crossing at the bottom takes the whole hillside’s worth. Systems here get sized for that reality, not for the rain that lands on your lot alone.
This isn’t only a rural problem, either. Plenty of ordinary suburban lots need solid pipe — a driveway that pitches toward the garage, a backyard low spot that collects runoff from three uphill neighbors, a side yard that turns into a channel every storm. In those cases the system is a basin or grate at the collection point, buried smooth-wall pipe under the lawn, and a discharge at daylight or another legal outlet with enough capacity to take the flow.
Driveway culverts
Get outside the city grid — Powell, Halls, Seymour, out toward Maryville — and long driveways cross roadside ditches and natural swales on their way to the house. The culvert under that crossing is usually the most neglected pipe on the property.
Most of what we replace is corrugated metal pipe installed decades ago. CMP fails from the invert — the bottom of the pipe — upward, which means it fails invisibly: the top half looks fine from either end while the floor of the pipe has rusted through and the barrel is slowly collapsing under every vehicle that crosses it. The other chronic problem is undersizing. A culvert that can’t pass a hard storm backs the ditch up until water flows over the driveway instead of under it, and moving water is merciless on gravel — it strips the surface, cuts channels along the edges, and hauls your driveway downstream a little at a time.
We replace failed culverts with double-wall HDPE — smooth interior for flow, corrugated exterior for strength — or with concrete pipe where loads demand it, set to the true grade of the ditch, properly bedded and compacted, with rip rap or headwalls at the ends so storm flow can’t scour the pipe out of the ground. Culvert work often pairs with broader driveway drainage fixes and with reshaping the swale or ditch that feeds the crossing.
A few signs a culvert is on borrowed time: water ponding at the pipe ends or a ditch that overtops in storms it used to pass; gravel repeatedly washing off the driveway above the pipe; rutting or sinking along the pipe line; rust flakes, a deformed barrel, or one end silted shut. Replacing a culvert on your schedule costs a fraction of rebuilding a collapsed crossing on the water’s schedule.
Where our work stops: public roads and rights-of-way
Straight talk on jurisdiction, because it matters on these projects more than any other. Culverts under public roads, pipes inside a public right-of-way, and anything in a recorded drainage easement belong to — or are regulated by — the county or city. We don’t freelance in public easements, period.
On your property, we design and build the whole system. Where a project touches the public side — a new driveway connection at a county road, for instance, where the road authority typically approves the culvert size — we either route the design around it or coordinate with the right department so the work is done once and done legally. And if the flooding on your land traces back to a failed pipe under the public road itself, we’ll tell you that plainly and point you to the county, because you shouldn’t pay a contractor for a problem that’s the government’s to fix.
What the work involves and what it costs
These are excavator jobs: trenching or removing the old crossing, cutting grade so the pipe actually falls in the right direction, bedding, setting pipe, compacting in lifts, and armoring the ends. On buried storm lines we set catch basins at the collection points, add cleanouts on long runs so the pipe can be maintained without digging, and daylight the outlet somewhere that can take the flow without eroding — often onto rip rap for exactly that reason. Slope matters as much as size: a big pipe laid flat moves less water than a properly graded smaller one, and it silts up besides.
Most residential storm-drain and culvert projects land between $2,000 and $8,000. A simple culvert swap on an accessible driveway sits at the low end; long solid-pipe runs with multiple basins, deep burial, or concrete pipe push toward the top. Diameter, trench depth, material, and equipment access are the levers that move the price.
Move the big water before it moves your driveway
If a ditch, a failing culvert, or a whole slope’s worth of runoff is flooding part of your property, call us or send the quote form. We’ll walk the flow path, sort out what’s yours to fix and what isn’t, and put a fixed number on it. Free estimates across Knox County and the surrounding area.