French Drain Installation in Paris, KY

Stoner Creek and the Licking drainage

Stoner Creek winds through Paris and is joined there by Houston Creek; together their water heads north to become part of the South Fork of the Licking River. The creek bottoms in and around town flood, and lots along them have the double problem of a high water table in wet seasons and an outlet that is itself underwater when the creek is up. Drainage design on those properties has to get water to a discharge point that stays above flood stage, or hold it and pump when the creek recedes.

Away from the creek, Paris is on the same rolling Inner Bluegrass limestone as Fayette County, with the same thin silt loam over clay. The Kentucky Geological Survey's description of the region applies: springs, sinkholes and sinking streams, and a rule that nothing collected on a lot gets routed into a depression that takes water.

Bourbon County's older housing

Paris has one of the larger stocks of nineteenth-century housing in the region, concentrated around Main Street, the courthouse and the streets running down to the creek. Those houses have deep, hand-dug cellars, stone foundations, and downspouts that have watered the foundation for a very long time. Standing water in a Paris basement in March is nearly a tradition. Breaking it means roof water underground and away from the house, positive grade rebuilt at the wall, and, where the cellar still takes water low, an interior drain to a sump with a discharge carried well clear of the house.

The ranch and split-level neighborhoods that grew out along the bypass and US 68 in the 1960s and 70s have a different issue: settled backfill has left a trough along the foundation, and the original grading has flattened out. Clay fill against the wall and a swale along the side yard to the street usually put it right.

Sinkholes, springs and the Bourbon County pattern

Bourbon County is Inner Bluegrass to the core, and the Kentucky Geological Survey's description of the region - limestone dissolved by groundwater into channels, drained partly from below through springs, sinkholes and sinking creeks - applies to Paris as much as to Lexington. The farms around town have karst features that farmers have worked around for two centuries; the town's lots have the same features under the grass. A depression in a Paris yard that never holds water for long is treated as a connection to the aquifer. Nothing collected on the lot goes into it, and if it is deepening, a geotechnical look comes before any drainage work nearby.

The soil follows the regional profile the USDA-NRCS describes for Maury and McAfee ground: silt loam less than a foot thick over clay, with rock at 20 to 40 inches where McAfee dominates. In Paris that means French drain trenches are sized to what the clay and the rock allow, and grading and downspout routing do as much of the job as possible on the surface. Roof water from the tall, steep-roofed houses that line the older streets is a large volume landing in a small yard, and an underground line to the street or alley is usually the single biggest improvement a Paris property can make.

What an assessment in Paris covers

Where your lot sits relative to the creek and to any depression that takes water, where the downspouts go now, how much fall exists to the street or a rear swale, and how deep the clay is. From that comes a written plan with the outlet named. It is free and there is no obligation to go further.