Dickens Place

Dickens Place

Dickens Place is a highly desirable, deed restricted neighborhood in Southaven, Mississippi. Originally developed more than twenty years ago, there were dozens of lots that never sold and were still owned by the developer. Almost all of the unsold lots were picked over and had significant engineering and storm water problems.

Dickens Place is an open ditch subdivision, with no underground storm sewers. Drainage for the entire community was handled by large, open drainage ditches that were parallel to the street at the front of each lot and large corrugated steel culverts were used to pass stormwater under driveways.

The volume of storm water that drained across many of our lots was tremendous. All of the grading and culverts were insufficient to provide adequate drainage. Correcting the elevations, grading, and drainage across three of the lots took 270 forty ton dump trucks to deliver 136,000 cubic feet of fill.

Two driveway culverts, each four feet in diameter were required to handle 12,430 gallons of storm water per minute, with enough fall to insure it would never back up. That’s 745,000 gallons of storm water per hour. Additionally, each driveway required two 12 inch thick concrete head walls that were 20 feet wide by 10 feet tall.

I was the only builder or engineer in twenty years to devise a solution to the civil engineering and drainage problems. By re-engineering, I salvaged three oversized 100 X 200 foot building lots, worth more than $100,000 each, in a high demand location.