French Drain Installation in Georgetown, KY

The Royal Spring connection

Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government's watershed pages note that the Cane Run watershed, about 45 square miles, starts in central Fayette County and flows north into Scott County to meet North Elkhorn Creek, and that its Royal Spring karst basin supplies drinking water to Georgetown. In plain terms: rain that goes down a sinkhole in the north end of Lexington can come out of the ground in downtown Georgetown.

That is why drainage in Georgetown follows the karst rule strictly. The Kentucky Geological Survey is clear that karst aquifers do not filter what enters them. A downspout, a driveway drain or a French drain outletting into a depression on a Georgetown lot is not just a sinkhole risk; it is a straight line to the town's water supply. Everything collected on a lot goes to a surface outlet: curb, swale, creek-side daylight, or a pump to one of those.

Two Georgetowns, two sets of yards

The old town along Main Street and around Georgetown College has the housing stock of a Bluegrass county seat: frame and brick houses with basements or crawlspaces, deep lots, mature trees and downspouts that have discharged at the foundation for a century. The work there is grading the first ten feet, taking roof water underground to the street, and dealing with tree roots in whatever drains were installed decades ago.

The Georgetown that grew up after Toyota's plant began production in the late 1980s is a different place: subdivisions south and east toward the Fayette line and along Cherry Blossom Way, built on graded clay with rear-lot swales as the designed outlet. The recurring call is a back yard that holds water because the swale was filled, fenced or never had fall to begin with. Re-establishing that swale and carrying downspouts to it fixes most of them.

North Elkhorn Creek runs through town and floods its bottomland; lots near it can have high water at the wrong time and need an outlet that still works when the creek is up.

Scott County clay and a creek that backs up

Georgetown's yards sit on the same Inner Bluegrass soils the USDA-NRCS describes for Fayette County: Maury, with a silt loam surface about 9 inches deep over clay to more than four feet, and McAfee, with clay over limestone at 20 to 40 inches. Water perches on that clay, and graded subdivision lots have little of the silt loam left to buffer it. In a wet May, when the NWS normals put Lexington-area rainfall at about 5.4 inches for the month, that perched water shows up as a soggy back yard and a damp basement wall at the same time.

The added Georgetown variable is North Elkhorn Creek and its tributaries, which run through the middle of town and rise fast in a storm. Lots along the creek and its bottoms can have an outlet that is above water on a normal day and under it during the storm that matters. On those properties the design uses a discharge point high enough to keep working when the creek is up, or a sump that holds water and pumps when it drops. A gravity drain that ends below flood stage backs up into the yard exactly when you need it most, and it is one of the first things checked on any lot within a few hundred feet of the creek.

Getting to Georgetown

Georgetown is about fourteen miles north of downtown Lexington on I-75 and US 25, an easy run for an assessment. Bring what you know about when the yard floods and how long it sits, and if there is any spot on the lot that swallows water faster than the rest, point it out first.