Shreveport · NW Louisiana Guide
The five most common reasons Shreveport yards flood after rain — and which one is probably yours.
The single most common cause of yard flooding in Shreveport is negative grade — the ground slopes toward the house or toward a low pocket instead of away and out. Foundation plants that got built up over years, mulch layers that never got removed before the new one went down, driveways or walks that settled inward — any of these gradually reverses the drainage. Fix: regrading, sometimes paired with swale cutting. See grading and regrading.
A 4-foot splash block does almost nothing to move roof runoff away from a Shreveport house. In a typical 1-inch rain, each downspout is dumping 300+ gallons in an hour. That water immediately soaks into the clay 2-3 feet from your foundation and either enters the crawlspace or backs up in the yard. Fix: buried downspout extensions to a legal discharge. See downspout drainage.
NW Louisiana clay percolates at under 1 inch per hour when dry and effectively zero when saturated. Once the ground is wet, everything else that falls just pools on top. This is a symptom, not a cause — but it means solutions have to move water away, not into the ground. Fix: French drains, catch basins, or engineered dry wells sized for real (near-zero) percolation.
Sometimes a yard is basically shaped like a bathtub — a low point in the middle that traps whatever runs off the surrounding grade. Grading may not fix it because the fix would require reshaping the whole yard. The pragmatic solution is a catch basin at the low point tied to a French-drain trunk or sump-and-discharge system that pumps out. See catch basins.
A shared property line where the neighbor's yard drains onto yours is a very common Shreveport situation. Louisiana law is that you can't dump concentrated runoff onto adjacent property but you also can't stop natural sheet flow. The remedy is a swale or intercept drain along the property line that catches their runoff before it reaches your yard. Fix: intercept swale + French drain, tied to a legal discharge.
Watch the yard during or right after a rain. Where is the water coming in from? Where does it pool? Where does it stop? A licensed contractor doing a proper site visit does the same thing — walk during a rain, or hose-test if it's dry — then sketches a fix that matches the actual water path, not a template.
A local coordinator will do a site walkover and provide a written itemized quote — no pressure.
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