Clarence excavation and demolition, from the Hollow to Tonawanda Creek

When the bucket finds limestone near Main Street

The escarpment is not just scenery. Where the NRCS maps Benson soils in and around the Hollow, the soil is a very channery loam, crowded with thin, flat stone fragments, with limestone 10 to 20 inches down. Trench spoil there comes up as much rock as dirt. That changes how a dig gets planned:

• Basements and footings. A full-depth basement may mean removing rock, so decide early whether the design can sit shallower or step with the ground. How footings bear on rock is a call for your engineer or architect and the Building Department.
• Pools. An in-ground pool needs a hole at least a few feet deep across its whole footprint, and deeper at the deep end. On a shallow-rock lot, find that out before the pool kit is ordered.
• Trenches. Water services, conduit and sewer lines need cover. Where rock is close, the route and depth get worked out on site rather than guessed from a drawing.

Clarence already requires a soil boring for a new house, and those results are the first thing we ask to see. On an addition or pool excavation, we look at the lot, the slope and any exposed ledge with you before pricing, so rock shows up in the plan instead of halfway through the dig.

Clay flats and floodplain on the north end of town

Most of the town north of the escarpment sits on the floor of old Lake Tonawanda, and it acts like it. Lake clay is slow to take in water, so rain and snowmelt stand on the surface and load up against basement walls. Tonawanda, Ransom, Gott, Beeman and Black creeks all run through or along the town, and the town's plan calls the wide flood zone up north constrained for development.

On these lots the useful work is mostly about moving water somewhere it can go:

• Regrading so the yard falls away from the house instead of toward it.
• French drains and buried downspout lines that carry water to a ditch, swale or approved outlet instead of into the clay around a foundation.
• Farm ponds on larger parcels, where the clay can hold water rather than lose it.

Before anything is filled or regraded in a mapped flood zone, check with the Building Department. The comprehensive plan notes that the town works with the state DEC and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect floodplains and wetlands through its review of new development. Once the plan is settled, we can build the drainage system and shape the grades around it, with equipment routes planned around lawns that stay soft into late spring.

Big lots, new houses and the order the town expects

A new house on a one- or two-acre lot here is mostly site work before it's carpentry: a long driveway from the road, trees to clear, long utility runs, and grading that has to match the approved plan. Clarence also sets the order for that work:

1. File a complete building permit application, including the soil boring, the lot grading and drainage plan and driveway culvert approval from the highway department that controls the road. No lot clearing or filling happens before that.
2. Get the driveway stone base and any culvert in place before site work starts. Only that highway department installs the pipe.
3. Have the building inspector on site to check grades and setbacks before excavation.
4. Pass the footing and foundation inspections, then file a spotted survey before construction continues.

We plan our part of new home construction around that sequence, so the excavator isn't sitting idle waiting on a sign-off. On the quarter-acre lots around the Clarence Center four corners, jobs are tighter: a worn-out garage, a new slab, a wet backyard. Tell us where the property is, attach a couple of pictures if you have them, and we'll come out to look it over.