New Deal is a farm town of about 730 people on I-27 eleven miles north of Lubbock, sitting on the same caliche-floored, playa-pocked tableland that keeps yards wet across northern Lubbock County.
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New Deal is a farm town of about 730 people on I-27 eleven miles north of Lubbock, sitting on the same caliche-floored, playa-pocked tableland that keeps yards wet across northern Lubbock County.
The Handbook of Texas counted 922 playas in Lubbock County in 1968, wind-scoured basins scattered across a tableland that slopes only gently from northwest to southeast. New Deal sits in the northern part of that county on I-27, Farm Road 1729 and the Santa Fe tracks, in a stretch of country given over to cotton gins and, at one time, onion-packing sheds. Playas are the drainage system out here; there is no creek network, so rainfall collects in whichever basin is closest.
The Texas Water Development Board measured average playa infiltration at less than 0.04 to a little over 0.8 inches per day, which is why a basin that fills in a June storm can still be holding water in August. A house lot on the rim of one of those basins is, in a small way, part of the basin. Water arrives from higher ground and does not leave.
The settlement started in 1909 when the railroad came through from Plainview and was first called Monroe. It only became New Deal when four rural school districts consolidated in 1935 and took the name from Roosevelt's programs; the post office followed in 1949 and the town incorporated in 1970 with about 500 people. It has grown slowly since, to 730 at the 2020 count.
Slow growth means a mix of lots: older houses in town, newer places on the edges, and farm homesteads out on the section roads. What they share is the ground the Handbook describes for the county, brown and reddish-brown loams and sandy loams over a clay subsoil, with a caliche hardpan two to three feet down. Water gets through the loam, stalls on the clay, and stops at the caliche.
On a New Deal lot the difference between a dry yard and a wet one is measured in inches of elevation, not feet. The Olton clay loam that NRCS maps across these plains has moderately slow permeability and is rated low-runoff on slopes under one percent, which describes most yards here. That is the setup for ponding: the water neither sinks nor slides.
So we start with a level, not a shovel. If the lot has any fall toward a street or a bar ditch, grading and a shallow swale can usually recover it. If it does not, the plan becomes a catch basin at the low point feeding a French drain that runs to a positive outlet, or to a sump pump where no outlet exists by gravity.
Outside the city limits the drainage question gets bigger. Field runoff from a neighboring quarter section can sheet across a homestead yard after a heavy rain, and a septic drainfield that sits in the path of that water stops working. On rural New Deal properties we use berms and diversion swales to route the field water around the house, the barn and the drainfield, and reserve the buried drain for the ground right around the foundation. A large-lot fix is more earthwork and less pipe.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to New Deal — and it all starts with understanding why yards here flood:
Standing water that outlasts every storm, a soft spot that never firms up, or a drain that quit moving water: all of it starts with a free look at the lot. Call (806) 298-6289 and we will come out to New Deal, read the grades, check how deep the caliche sits, and tell you plainly what would fix it and what would not.
Free on-site drainage assessments in New Deal 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.