Ralls, at the junction of US 62/82 and Highway 207 twenty-seven miles east of Lubbock, is a Crosby County cotton town whose late-1940s building boom left a lot of yards that were never graded to drain.
Tell us what your yard is doing and we’ll come take a look — no charge.
Ralls, at the junction of US 62/82 and Highway 207 twenty-seven miles east of Lubbock, is a Crosby County cotton town whose late-1940s building boom left a lot of yards that were never graded to drain.
John R. Ralls laid out the townsite in 1911 and hauled businesses and houses over from Emma to fill it, but the Ralls you drive through today owes more to the 1940s. The Handbook of Texas records that area farms went under irrigation that decade, prosperity came back, and a building boom got under way in the late 1940s; by 1951 the town had more than 100 businesses. It was still the largest town in Crosby County in 1980, at 2,422 people, and counted 1,834 in 2010.
Houses and lots from that boom are now seventy-plus years old. Grading standards were loose, driveways and additions came later, and the ground has had decades to settle. When a Ralls homeowner calls about a backyard that floods, the cause is usually not one mistake but the accumulation of many small ones on a lot that never had much fall to begin with.
Crosby County splits in two. The Handbook describes the western half, where Ralls sits, as flat land covered by rich loam lying above the Caprock, and the eastern part as broken country below it, cut by Blanco Canyon and the White River. Drainage across the county goes to the forks of the Brazos, the White River and numerous playas. Ralls is on the flat side of that line, and the flat side drains to playas.
The county averages about 21 inches of rain a year, a little more than Lubbock, and the Handbook notes the worst hail and wind storm in county history hit Ralls in June 1935. This is convective-storm country: the rain that matters comes in an afternoon, not a week. A loam yard over the region's caliche takes the first half inch and then starts shedding, and on a level lot shedding means pooling.
The work in Ralls is mostly about restoring what the lot lost. We survey the grades, find the original direction of fall if there was one, and rebuild it: leveling to pull water away from the slab, a swale along the fence line, a catch basin where the low corner has always been. A French drain goes in where water sits in the soil rather than on it, and it always runs to an outlet, because loam over caliche will not absorb what a trench collects.
Older systems are common here too. If a previous owner put in a drain that has since silted up, crushed under a driveway or simply never had an outlet, repairing or rerouting it is often cheaper than starting over, and we will tell you which.
A house that has stood in Ralls since the Truman administration has been through a lot of seasons of soil swelling in the fall rains and shrinking in the summer heat. That cycle is hardest on the perimeter, where a flowerbed built up against the wall or a downspout dumping at the corner keeps one side of the foundation wetter than the other. Foundation drainage on an older Ralls house means getting downspouts piped away, re-establishing a slope off the slab, and drying out the chronically wet side so the whole foundation moves together, if it moves at all.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to Ralls — and it all starts with understanding why yards here flood:
Town lot or a farmhouse out on a county road, the visit is free and the advice is straight. Call (806) 298-6289 and tell us what the yard does after a hard rain. We will come to Ralls, walk it, and lay out exactly what it would take to get the water moving.
Free on-site drainage assessments in Ralls 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.