How to find a professional to help with groundwater control ?

[david.boreham]

My home is built on a flatish site half way up a mountain. Terrain and soil type appears to yield water in the soil around and under the house (other sources of water such as gutters and leaking pipes having been eliminated).

I'd like to find someone (engineer of some kind ?) to investigate the situation and with the benefit of experience advise what measures should be taken to divert the ground water.

So far , so good. Problem is there is no such person in the local Yellow Pages. I suspect that I'm not searching on the right keyword. I also figure that there has to be a professional association for drainage engineers (or whatever they're called).

Any help is welcome.

(I'm in the western USA, BTW).

Thanks.

[SQLit]

damn that broken google finger again Results 1 - 10 of about 2,030,000 for drainage engineering. (0.29 seconds

[Banty]

Yeah really. With Google, let's just shut down alt.home.repair. Gosh forbid, someone may actually ask a question here. :-/

Banty

[david.boreham]

Sarcastic, but actually useful. Of course I've done hundreds of google searches, but not that one. I tried 'drainage engineer', which does not yield any interesting results. Google need more semantic analysis in their search string processing...

Thanks anyway.

[Vic Dura]

Hydrologist. Check to see if your state/county has a hydrology group. Most do. That's a place to start. Or try the nearest large university. They should have a geology/hydrology dept.

[DanG]

Try soils engineer or geotechnical engineer.

(top posted for your convenience) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Keep the whole world singing . . . . DanG (remove the sevens) [e-mail]

[Gideon]

One bit of warning. I hired such an expert years ago and although he was fairly knowledgable, his advice was fairly useless to me. I've got a suburban home, in a nice neighborhood, with a well manicured lawn on which the children play soccer, volleyball, football, etc, etc.

My expert suggested a major regrading of the lawn, creating swales in the middle of the back yard, installing large catch basins in the swales, and tying the catch basins to an underground drainage system. I'm certain that his design would work and greatly reduce the problems that I had, but it was competely unacceptable to me. He really didn't want to discuss anything which didn't include the heavy regrading and swales. (He just advises, he doesn't perform the work). What he suggested would have looked very out of character in our neighborhood and would have destroyed the appearance of the yard which I've worked very hard to achieve.

Just a warning.