In our latest video, Joe breaks down the mystery of property drainage. You might be surprised to learn that while every property deals with stormwater—after all, the rain doesn’t just skip over your lot—not every property has a formal, underground storm drain system. This is especially common for older sites built in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. In these cases, water often “sheet flows” across paved surfaces and exits through driveways or parking lots.
Why does this matter? Regardless of whether you have underground pipes or surface runoff, you are responsible for the water that lands on your property and whatever it carries away with it. Understanding your system is the first step in practicing good “housekeeping” and effective management.
Watch the video to see how we can help you do the legwork. We offer courtesy site evaluations to identify your drains or create a site map showing exactly how your surface runoff discharges. Don’t stay in the dark about your infrastructure—let us provide the clarity you need.
Video Transcript
0:00 Intro
0:18 Not All Properties Are The Same
0:44 Courtesy Check At Your Service
1:00 Stormwater Does Exist…
0:00 Intro
Joe Warner, TCE and CCE president. Our customers ask us or they’re wondering, they’re just curious if they have the stormwater system on their property. Don’t have to dive into it too much. You can Google it if you want. That’s not going to tell you anything because they don’t know your specific property. Just give us a call. Send us your address. We’ll go out there. We’ll take a look at it.
0:18 Not All Properties Are The Same
Maybe one out of a hundred properties, older infrastructures, do not have a stormwater system. When that happens, it’s all just sheet flowing off their site. So they won’t install any underground storm drain systems. They’ll just have usually things that were built some in the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s. A lot of these properties will just build a flat paved surface and a building on it and they’ll grade it to where everything just flows out the front parking lot, you know, out the driveways.
0:44 Courtesy Check At Your Service
We’ll go out there and look at it as a courtesy. We’ll go out there and, you know, tell you if there’s any storm drains on your lot. If there isn’t, then we’ll just go ahead and make a note in our system and we’ll let you know, “Hey, everything’s sheet flowing.” So we can put a little site map together for you showing the direction of the surface runoff and showing you where it’s discharging.
1:00 Stormwater Does Exist…
You do have stormwater on your property because the rain is not just going to miss your property. It’s going to land on your property. So you are responsible for what’s on the surface of your property, all that sheet flow, and then it’s going to carry all that stuff off of your property. So you are responsible for that. You do have to demonstrate some good best management practices, good housekeeping, but you do not have a storm drain system on your property in that case.
So, if you want to just have us go out there and take a look, do all the leg work for you, tell you if you have a stormwater system or not, give us a call, shoot us an email, and we’ll get out there and have a site evaluation performed. We appreciate it.
