Seeking the drainage/gravel road contractors in PA

mobile home university
1

Hi everyone, I wonder if someone can give me some tips in the following situation:
We own a small park in the Greater Pittsburgh area . Park is located on the hill and has two major issues:

  1. gravel road condition (it has potholes and unsufficient drainage which caused the road practically disappear);
  2. flooding of basements when it rains in storage building and few mobile homes.

I am having a problem to find a contractor who can help to fix those issues. I contacted the following types of companies from bbb, manta and yellow pages: excavating, drainage, landscaping, roads.
The current state is:
a) A lot of the contractors I contacted have told that they are overbooked for the next few months and refused to even look at the park to give a quote for the future. It’s hard to believe that excavating/drainage companies are so overbooked that they aren’t interested in a new clients.
b) The guys who expressed interest in our project and came to see our park haven’t sent any quotes. I don’t know the reason as they didn’t take phone since their visits. Our manager on-site (I am out-of-state) who met those guys also don’t have any ideas why the contractors haven’t provided any quotes.
I can’t understand the reason why any of the contractors who saw our park didn’t provide a quote.
c) There were a few contractors who arranged meetings but have never showed up.

Bottom line - I am stuck. I already spent 3 months and contacted x contractors and I still don’t have an idea which type of contractor can solve those issues, what needs to be done, and how much would it cost.
All thoughts, recommendations and ideas are highly appreciated.

2

I have better experiences with contractors like this in person. In a lot of cases they need to be told what to do because they just move dirt.

You might call a civil engineer out for a consultation to get ideas on what you can do and then prescribe to the dirt movers what needs to happen.

Dirt movers don’t want to worry about a call from you after a bad storm that their “idea” didn’t work so they have to fix it on their dime.

Use this approach with several contractors with the right equipment and you can usually reverse engineer what it should cost based on the number of days.

It sounds like you need ditches and French drains strategically placed to divert water to the right places.

2 Likes
3

That sounds exactly like business as usual with contractors. It is always like this until you find your go-to guy.

4

Thank you, jhutson, for your advice. I wasn’t able to find any self employed civil engineer. The civil engineering companies I contacted don’t do anything without survey. A survey costs $5000-$8000. We’ll need a drainage plan ($3000-$4000). Those additional expenses are out of our budget.

I found a landscaping company who gave us a quote. The proposal is good.