Detention Pond and Basin Repair hero
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Service · Basin Repair

Detention pond and retention basin repair in San Antonio. Drainage restored to the original design volume.

Bathymetric survey, sediment removal, regrading, and outlet rebuild for detention ponds and retention basins that have silted in, washed out, or stopped draining the way the design drawing said they would.

Turnaround
2–6 weeks
Quote back in
48 hours
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Why this matters

Most Texas detention ponds lose a quarter of their design volume in the first decade.

A Texas detention or retention basin typically loses 15 to 25 percent of its design volume to sediment in the first ten years. By year fifteen, side-slope erosion and embankment settlement have usually taken another slice. The lost capacity is invisible until the storm event that overtops the basin sends water into the buildings, the parking lot, or the property line behind it.

Full restoration for detention ponds, retention basins, drainage ponds, and infiltration basins across Bexar County and the I-35 corridor. We survey what you have, restore it to what the original drawing called for, and file the documentation with the municipality so the asset is back on the books.

Every detention pond, retention basin, and infiltration basin on a Texas commercial site (the drainage pond behind the building, whatever the plat happens to call it) was built to a specific design volume: a number on a drawing the original civil engineer stamped, tied to a 25-year or 100-year storm calculation that the city accepted at platting. That number is the basin's job. Sediment accumulation, vegetative overgrowth, slope failure, and outlet damage all chip away at it, and nothing on the property is measuring the loss until an inspector or a flood does. The pond looks like a pond right up until the day it stops draining.

Most of the basins we get called to had something visible go wrong first. An HOA board notices the back pond looks half full of cattails. A property manager opens a Notice of Violation from the city after a routine MS4 audit. A buyer's due-diligence team flags the basin behind Building C during a sale. Whatever the trigger, the underlying problem is almost always the same: the basin has been quietly losing capacity for a decade and nobody owned the maintenance. Which repair it needs depends on what kind of basin it is, and a surprising number of owners have never been told.

Landscaping crews can mow the slopes and pull the woody growth. They cannot tell you how much storage volume the basin has left, and they cannot restore it. That requires a bathymetric survey to measure current bottom elevation against the design drawing, a sediment-removal plan with legal off-site disposal, slope regrading back to the engineered cross-section, and a post-construction survey to prove the restored volume matches the original number. That documentation is what gets filed with the city and what closes the compliance loop.

Our process

From bathymetric survey to design-volume sign-off.

  1. Step 01

    Survey

    Bathymetric survey of the existing basin floor and slopes, compared point-for-point against the original civil drawing. You see exactly how many cubic yards of capacity have been lost and where.

  2. Step 02

    Permit

    Scope coordinated with the City of San Antonio (or applicable MS4), watershed authority, and a project SWPPP for the work itself. No surprises with the inspector mid-dig.

  3. Step 03

    Restore

    Sediment excavated and hauled under manifest, side slopes regraded to the design cross-section, outlet structure rebuilt or replaced where it has failed, native seed and erosion-control blanket installed.

  4. Step 04

    Verify

    Post-construction survey confirms restored volume matches the design drawing. Documentation is filed with the municipality and added to your post-construction stormwater file.

What you receive

What a full detention pond and basin restoration includes.

  • Pre-work bathymetric survey with cubic-yard capacity-loss report
  • Sediment removal with off-site disposal manifests
  • Side-slope regrading to original engineered cross-section
  • Outlet structure rehabilitation or full replacement
  • Native seeding and erosion-control blanket, plus filed post-construction survey
Restored detention basin with regraded slopes and clean outlet structure
Neglected detention basin overgrown with weeds and debris before restoration
Pre-repairRestored
← DRAG TO COMPARE →
Common questions

Detention pond and basin repair questions from Texas owners.

A detention basin temporarily holds stormwater runoff and releases it slowly through an outlet structure, and is dry most of the year. A retention pond holds water permanently and releases excess through an emergency spillway. Both require ongoing inspection, sediment management, and structural maintenance to keep their design storage volume.

Sediment depth is the tell. If the forebay has silted level with the main cell, or the lowest orifice on the outlet is buried, you're already below design volume. A bathymetric survey turns that into a number. Most Texas basins lose about a quarter of their capacity in the first decade.

Two to six weeks for a typical commercial basin, driven mostly by how wet the site is and how far the spoil has to travel. We survey first, so you have the volume, the haul-off count, and a fixed price before any equipment shows up.

For a restoration back to the approved design volume, usually a final walk and the as-built survey. If we have to change the outlet structure or regrade the slopes, that's a plan revision through the city first. Either way we handle the submittal.

It's in the price, and the haul-off count is on the quote before we start, because that number is most of the cost on a silted basin. Clean basin sediment usually goes to a permitted fill site. If the basin sits below a fueling area, a wash bay, or an older industrial tenant, we test first, because sediment that comes back contaminated is a different disposal path and a different number, and finding that out mid-job is how a fixed price stops being fixed.

Its storage is reduced while the equipment is in it, so we sequence around the forecast and stage work so the outlet stays clear. On a basin that's the only detention for the site we'll do it in halves rather than take the whole cell down at once. What we won't do is open a basin up going into a wet week and leave you with no storage and a bare slope.

Usually it starts as one and becomes the other. A pond that holds water for days after a storm has either a plugged outlet, a low-flow channel that has silted over, or enough accumulated sediment that the bottom now sits above the lowest orifice. The first is a maintenance visit. The last is a restoration, and no amount of mowing fixes it. We can usually tell which from photos of the outlet structure and the forebay, and if it is the cheap one we will say so on the phone.
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