Lorenzo sits on US 82 twenty miles east of Lubbock in Crosby County, a cotton town where the same flat loam that makes the fields productive leaves the yards with nowhere to send a storm.
Tell us what your yard is doing and we’ll come take a look — no charge.
Lorenzo sits on US 82 twenty miles east of Lubbock in Crosby County, a cotton town where the same flat loam that makes the fields productive leaves the yards with nowhere to send a storm.
By 1962 the school districts of Pleasant Hill, Estacado, Robertson and Farmer had all folded into Lorenzo's, and the Handbook of Texas puts the consolidated district at 226 square miles. That is the service area in miniature: a small town, 1,394 people at its 1980 high and 964 at the 2020 count, surrounded by a large spread of cotton land and the farmsteads that work it. A lot of the drainage calls we get from Lorenzo are not town lots at all but houses on acreage, where the water problem is field runoff first and yard grading second.
The townsite goes back to 1910, the first train came through on the Crosbyton-South Plains line in 1911, and Lorenzo incorporated in 1924. The Depression and the Dust Bowl thinned it out, then it grew again to a high of 1,394 in 1980. Cotton has carried the economy the whole way.
Lorenzo is on the plains side of Crosby County, which the Handbook describes as flat land under rich loam above the Caprock, draining to playas and the Brazos forks. Rainfall averages about 21 inches, and as everywhere on the South Plains it comes hard and fast in the warm months. The Amarillo fine sandy loam that NRCS describes as extensive across this part of the Southern High Plains is well drained in the technical sense, with moderate permeability, but sits on slopes of 0 to 5 percent, with runoff rated negligible at the flat end. The county's caliche is below that.
Put those together and you get a yard where the first inch of rain soaks in nicely and the second inch has nowhere to go. It cannot run off a lot with no fall, and it cannot keep soaking through a clay subsoil into hardpan. It ponds.
On a Lorenzo farm place the first priority is keeping the neighbor's quarter section out of your yard. A turn row that drains toward the house, a field road acting as a dam, or a bar ditch that has silted up can send sheet flow across a homestead every time it storms. That gets solved with earthwork: a diversion berm, a graded swale, sometimes reopening a ditch. Only after the big water is steered away does it make sense to talk about the yard.
The yard itself is a smaller version of the same problem. Roof water, patio water and the lawn's own runoff need a collector and an outlet: a catch basin feeding a French drain that ends at the ditch or the road, or a sump on a lot that is genuinely landlocked. Surface drainage and regrading do more of the work on acreage than buried pipe does.
Rural drainage failures show up in expensive places. A septic drainfield that stays saturated stops treating; a barn pad that ponds rots sills and footings; a driveway that holds water heaves in the freeze. When we lay out drainage for a Lorenzo property we map those assets first and design the flow paths around them, so the fix protects the drainfield instead of flooding it. On town lots the list is shorter, the slab and the crawl space, and foundation drainage is usually the piece that matters most.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to Lorenzo — and it all starts with understanding why yards here flood:
We come out, walk the property from the high side to the low side, and figure out where the water enters, where it stops and where it could leave. It costs nothing and there is no obligation to book work. Call (806) 298-6289 and tell us about your Lorenzo place; we will set up a time to look.
Free on-site drainage assessments in Lorenzo 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.