Dirtwork term
Culvert
also called: drain pipe, driveway culvert
Pipe or box buried under a road, driveway, or fill that lets water pass from one side to the other.
A culvert is the cross-drain that goes under your driveway, ranch road, or graded fill. Without it, runoff dams up on the uphill side and either overtops the road or scours around it. With one, the water passes through and the road stays intact.
Sizing is by watershed acreage and expected flow. A small residential driveway crossing a roadside ditch usually needs 12 to 18 inch corrugated metal or HDPE pipe. A ranch entrance crossing a real creek can need 36 inch and up, sometimes a box culvert instead of round.
Most rural undersized culverts trace back to nobody calculating the watershed, somebody picked a size based on what fit in the truck. We size to acreage, then add a margin for the bigger storms.
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Culvert comes up on drainage jobs all over East Texas.
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When you need it
When culvert comes up on a job
You need a culvert wherever a driveway or road crosses a ditch or a low run and cannot dam the water behind it. Size it wrong and the first hard rain either washes the crossing out or backs water onto the ground upstream.
Services where this shows up
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Related terms
Other words that come up alongside this one
Headwall
Concrete or rock structure at the inlet or outlet of a culvert that retains the embankment and directs flow.
Watershed
The area of land that drains to a single low point, every drop of rain that falls inside it ends up at the same place.
Swale
A shallow, vegetated ditch shaped to carry surface water away from a structure or down a property line.
Riprap
Loose stone placed on a slope or shoreline to absorb wave or storm energy and prevent erosion.
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