During severe flooding last autumn, the 18-inch culvert beneath my driveway filled to the peak with sediment. Result: astringent erosion of the driveway and clay road that led steeply uphill past my house to more than homes on the hillside outside the Town of Lyons, Colo.

Nosotros used a long-handled shovel to dig out the sandy sediment at both ends of the 35-pes culvert (and make some repairs to the road). That left the states with 30 feet of packed sand and rocks equally large as 9 inches.

Putting out a call for assistance on the Public Works website and social media, we got various suggestions. Nigh involved a vacuum truck or large amounts of water. But with Colorado's entire Forepart Range in dire condition, vacuum trucks in the area had much more pressing concerns than our driveway. And since our h2o supply is only by 1,000-gallon truck, loftier-volume water wasn't an option, either.

Searching online we found a simple hand tool from Design-ALL LLC. The owner, Bryan, agreed to transport the states ane to try out. The culvert cleaning tool is sort of a hoe on a swivel that allows one to push the tool flat into the culvert on a 10-human foot piece of pipe. The hoe drops downward when pulled back out, pulling debris with it.

My wife insisted that she was taking on this project. She worked for days, using the culvert cleaner and another tool she devised to first loosen the sediment enough to work the tool into place to pull out a shovel-full of sand and rock. Although she certainly made progress, the going was slow and the center of the canal remained filled.

During the first big snow melt of the wintertime, though, we could tell water was moving through the culvert, admitting slowly. Then came a huge thunderstorm in June that seemed to have filled the ditch at the lesser of the culvert with sediment. We assumed the pipe was too filled. Nosotros then had the ditch below the canal dug out with a back hoe and prepared to begin digging out the canal over again. But to our amazement, nosotros could see that the rain had actually washed almost of the sediment out and, with a lilliputian additional work with the tool, the culvert now is nearly free of sediment.

And then, in the end, the tool worked very well once the canal was less than packed full. The lesson is to non permit it go packed full! The other difficulty was that with the canal existence so long, and the ditch beneath being deep and curving, it was impossible to use 20 feet of pipe to push the tool in and pull it back out without uncoupling the piping on each pull. There isn't that much clearance below.

Nosotros want to sincerely thank Design-ALL for the tool. Several neighbors had expert success with shorter culverts that weren't packed full. See more than on this tool at www.design-all.com.