Abernathy straddles the Hale-Lubbock county line on I-27, eighteen miles north of Lubbock, on flat, playa-dotted farmland where a yard has no natural way to shed a storm.
Tell us what your yard is doing and we’ll come take a look — no charge.
Abernathy straddles the Hale-Lubbock county line on I-27, eighteen miles north of Lubbock, on flat, playa-dotted farmland where a yard has no natural way to shed a storm.
Abernathy was laid out in 1909 when the Santa Fe built its line from Plainview down to Lubbock, and by 1926 it was a cotton and grain center of about 1,500 people. The Handbook of Texas records the second burst: oil was found nearby in 1946 and 1947, the population climbed to 1,962 by the early 1950s and kept climbing to 2,904 by 1980, when 699 of those residents lived on the Lubbock County side of the line. Since then the count has held close to 2,800.
For a drainage contractor that history is useful. A town that added most of its people between the late 1940s and 1980, and has stayed about the same size since, is unlikely to be throwing up new subdivisions. What you are more likely to own is a lot that has been graded, paved, planted and re-planted across several owners, and the low spot that floods is often the sum of all those changes.
The Handbook describes Hale County as 979 square miles of flat terrain with sandy and loamy soils and many playas, between roughly 3,200 and 3,600 feet of elevation, taking about 19 inches of rain a year. The Acuff series, which NRCS first described in Hale County, is typical of this ground: a loam surface over a sandy clay loam subsoil that thickens into calcium carbonate with depth, on slopes of 0 to 5 percent. NRCS rates runoff on the flattest of those slopes as negligible.
Negligible runoff is a fine thing for a cotton field and a bad thing for a backyard. It means the water your roof and driveway shed during an I-27 thunderstorm goes to the lowest six inches of your lot and waits there. Over a clay subsoil and the region's caliche, waiting can take days.
Abernathy got a public water system in 1934 and a sewer system in 1949. Those handle what goes in the house. What falls on the yard is on you, and on a level lot in a town this age the water often has a dozen small obstacles between it and the street: a driveway poured higher than the lawn, a raised bed against the slab, a fence line that has silted into a low dam.
The first thing we do at an Abernathy house is shoot the grades with a level and find out which direction the lot actually falls, if it falls at all. Then we decide whether regrading alone will restore the fall, or whether the lot needs a collector, a French drain with a real outlet, and in the flattest cases a sump to lift the water out.
The county's many playas are not just a rural feature. A lot that sits on the gentle slope leading toward one of those basins is in the path of everyone's runoff, and that is the pattern behind the classic 'my yard floods and the neighbor's does not' call. The reasons are laid out in our guide to why yards flood on the South Plains, and they apply in Abernathy exactly as they do in Lubbock.
If your property is on a farmstead or an acreage outside the city limits, the scale changes but the logic does not: keep field and road runoff moving past the house and outbuildings with swales and berms, and give the house itself a dry perimeter with proper foundation drainage.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to Abernathy — and it all starts with understanding why yards here flood:
Whether you are on the Hale County side or the Lubbock County side of Abernathy, the assessment is free and the answer is specific to your lot, not a generic trench. Call (806) 298-6289, tell us what the water does after a storm, and we will come out and find where it is coming from and where it can go.
Free on-site drainage assessments in Abernathy and across the South Plains. We’ll tell you what’s actually causing the water — caliche, a flat lot, a nearby playa — and what it takes to fix it.