Riesel sits at State Highway 6 and FM 1860, fourteen miles southeast of Waco. The clay under your yard here is some of the most closely studied soil in the country - and it still will not drain.
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Riesel sits at State Highway 6 and FM 1860, fourteen miles southeast of Waco. The clay under your yard here is some of the most closely studied soil in the country - and it still will not drain.
Just outside Riesel, about two and a half miles from the town center, sits the USDA Agricultural Research Service's 840-acre experimental watershed facility known as the Riesel Watersheds, run by the Grassland Soil and Water Research Laboratory. The Handbook of Texas records an agricultural experimental station just east of town as far back as 1938. Researchers here measure exactly how rain behaves on Blackland clay - how much soaks in, how much runs off and how fast.
The short version of what they have found is what any Riesel homeowner already knows from the back yard: on this soil, rain mostly runs. The Houston Black series description rates runoff high even on ground with less than one percent slope, and very high on anything steeper. Permeability is very slow. Water goes in rapidly only while the soil is dry and cracked.
Take those figures to a house lot. A roof, a driveway and a lawn on Houston Black all shed water at nearly the same rate - the lawn just does it a few minutes later. Everything ends up at the lowest point on the property, and if that point is a fence corner or the back of the house, it stays there until it evaporates. A French drain in Riesel has to be built as a collector with a real outlet, because there is no soaking away into this clay.
The flip side is the dry season. When the clay cracks - half an inch to four inches wide at a foot down, per the NRCS - the soil pulls away from the slab, and the first storm afterward pours water straight into the gap. Keeping roof water away from the perimeter year-round is how you break that pattern.
Riesel began as a railroad section house called Roddy around 1880, drew German families, and took its name from W. H. Riesel, who built a gin there in 1890. It has grown slowly and steadily since, to just under a thousand people by 2000. That leaves a small town of ordinary house lots and, past the edges, acreage that has been farmed for generations.
On the acreage, the volume is the issue: sheet flow off a field crossing your place needs an interceptor swale more than it needs pipe. On the town lots, it is the opposite - little volume, but nowhere for it to go, which is catch basin and channel drain territory.
Houston Black runs 40 to 60 percent clay by the NRCS's own numbers, with very high shrink-swell potential. A foundation on it moves with the seasons unless the moisture around it stays reasonably even. Foundation drainage in Riesel is grading that falls away from the house, downspouts buried and carried off, and a collector where water still gathers - not a cure for a foundation that has already shifted, but the best way to keep one from starting.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to Riesel:
We cover Riesel and the southeast side of McLennan County along Highway 6. Call (254) 272-5068 and we will come out, free, and tell you what the clay is doing under your yard and what it will take to fix.
Free on-site drainage assessments in Riesel and across McLennan County. We’ll tell you what’s actually happening in your Blackland clay and what it takes to fix it.