Drainage contractor in Indianapolis, IN

Indianapolis, specifically

An old city, a new tunnel, and a lot of clay in between

Indianapolis is not a young city, and its drainage problems are not new either. This month made that obvious. The White River crested at 21.18 feet at the 82nd Street gauge, breaking a record that had stood since 1913, and the water reached Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and the north end of Broad Ripple. A river does not set a 113-year record because of one bad storm. It sets one because the ground around it has been paved, roofed and graded for more than a century, and every one of those changes sends water somewhere else faster than it used to move.

Underneath that river system sits Marion County's actual soil, and the county's own soil survey does not sugarcoat it. Brookston and Crosby, the two soils that dominate the county, are flagged as a wetness management concern, sitting in depressions and flats with a seasonal high water table that can reach the surface. The same document says these soils "respond well to tile drainage." That is not our marketing language. That is the Marion County Soil and Water Conservation District describing the ground under your yard.

The city has spent real money on the big-picture version of this problem. Citizens Energy Group's DigIndy tunnel runs 28 miles of pipe 18 feet across, 250 feet below the surface, built at a cost near $2 billion to hold more than 250 million gallons of combined sewer overflow before it can reach the White River, Fall Creek or Pogues Run. It is designed to capture at least 95 percent of that overflow. That tunnel protects the river. It does not touch what happens between your downspout and your foundation.

That gap is where most Indianapolis calls start. A lot of this city's housing stock is old enough that its drainage assumptions are older still. Median construction year across the city runs around 1973, and roughly 36.7 percent of homes were built before 1970. A pre-war Meridian-Kessler house, built out mostly from the early 1920s through the end of World War II, was graded to a standard nobody wrote down and a foundation type nobody upgraded since. A post-war ranch on a slab or shallow crawlspace has its own version of the same issue: seventy-plus years of settled backfill and a downspout system that was never meant to handle a 2026 storm.

Citizens Energy Group runs a program called Correct Connect specifically because so many of those older connections turned out to be wrong. Downspouts and sump pumps tied into the sanitary sewer instead of the storm system cause basement backups and add clean rainwater to a system meant for wastewater. They offer free dye testing to find out which pipe a downspout is actually feeding. That distinction, sanitary versus storm, is not a technicality here. It is the difference between water leaving your property cleanly and water backing up into your own basement during the next big rain.

On top of all that, the city bills stormwater by measured impervious area under the Marion County Stormwater Management District, which covers the consolidated city but not Beech Grove, Lawrence, Southport, Speedway or Cumberland, each of which runs its own separate system. Knowing which system your address actually falls under changes where a legal discharge point is. We check that before we design anything, because guessing wrong means redoing the work.