Orchard Park excavation, from pool digs to sewer laterals

Pool digs and basements on till over shale

A basement or an in-ground pool is where Orchard Park's ground shows its hand. Derb and similar till soils drain slowly, and from November through May they can hold a perched water table within a foot and a half of the surface. Open a pool hole in April and you may be pumping before you reach grade. Go deep enough and you can meet shale, which in the town's most common mapped soil is often within 10 feet.

Here's how we plan around it:

• Book pool and foundation digs for late spring through fall when the schedule allows, and keep a pump on site either way.
• Dig a test hole at the deep end or a footing corner first, so rock or water shows up before the full dig instead of halfway through it.
• Weathered shale usually comes out with a bucket; harder beds can need a hammer, and we tell you if we hit them.
• Backfill walls in compacted lifts, with footing drains and clean stone so water has somewhere to go.

Pools need a building permit, and State code and Town ordinance both require an in-ground pool to be fenced at least four feet high, with gates that close and latch on their own. Plan the fence line and the spoil pile together so a finished yard isn't torn up twice.

Sewer District No. 3 up north, septic tanks down south

Before we price sewer work in Orchard Park, we find out what your house actually drains to. North of Route 240 it's usually public sewer in Erie County Sewer District No. 3. Across much of the south and northeast it's often a private septic system, and the Town points septic installs to the Erie County Health Department.

On a sewered lot, the lateral is yours. The county sewer district rules define the building sewer as the pipe from five feet outside your wall to where it connects to the public sewer, privately owned and maintained, and put the cost of installing and connecting it on the owner. In the Town, a repair means a Town Sanitary Sewer Repair Permit, a county sewer permit, a right-of-way permit from whichever agency owns the road if one is required, and a day's notice to the Town Engineering Department before construction starts. The trench stays open until the district inspects it.

Those rules also bar sump pumps, footing drains and roof leaders from the sanitary line, so we run that water to a storm drainage line or bubbler outlet instead. In the Town, installing a bubbler takes a right-of-way permit through the Town Clerk and a Highway Department inspection.

Hillsides, creek corridors and wooded southern lots

Most of the town is gentle, but not all of it. A few hundred acres run between 30 and 43 percent slope, concentrated in the southeast around Chestnut Ridge Park and the rural land nearby. On a lot like that, the driveway has to be cut and pitched so it sheds water instead of washing out, and runoff from the hill above the house has to be caught and carried around it rather than left to find the basement.

Creek corridors bring their own limits. Mapped 100-year floodplain follows Smokes Creek, its South Branch and Neuman Creek, and new development there needs a floodplain development permit from the Town. If your lot backs onto one of those channels, we check the flood map before planning fill, a pond or a new outbuilding.

Many southern parcels are also wooded and unsewered. For a new house or pole barn we clear the building pad and driveway line, mulch brush in place where it makes sense, and flag the future septic area so loaded machines stay off it. Compacting that ground can hurt how a leach field performs, and on soils already rated very limited for absorption, you can't afford to lose any of it.