Everything we get asked about
dredging.

Heavily dependent on volume and access:

• Small residential cove (a few hundred cu yd) — 3–5 working days
• Mid-size pond restoration (1,000–3,000 cu yd) — 2–4 weeks
• Larger lake projects (10,000+ cu yd) — 2+ months

We give you a realistic timeline after the bathymetric survey, including any agency wait. Our dredging guide has the full assessment process.

Sediment accumulates from three sources over time: stormwater runoff carries clay and silt, organic matter (leaves, aquatic vegetation) decays into a soft mucky bottom, and bank erosion adds soil. The result is shallower water, worse circulation, less dissolved oxygen, and more algae.

On private lakes specifically, dredging is the maintenance step that brings a tired pond back to a healthy fishery. We wrote a full guide on the signs your lake needs it.

Three disposal strategies, cheapest to most expensive:

1. On-site spreading — dewater the spoils in a containment cell, then spread on adjacent pasture or low-spot fill on your property. Cheapest if you have the land.
2. Beneficial reuse — use the material to raise driveways, build berms, or backfill a retaining wall on the same property.
3. Off-site haul — trucks to a permitted disposal facility. Can double project cost on tight-access sites.

We design disposal alongside the dredge plan, not after. Sometimes the disposal solution pays back — re-grading a low-spot pasture or fixing a driveway turns the dredge cost into improvement spending.

Yes. Dredging on essentially any open water body is regulated at federal and state level. The three agencies you'll touch:

• TCEQ — turbidity control, sediment containment, disposal-site approval
• Army Corps of Engineers — Section 404 permit for any fill/discharge into navigable waters
• Lake authority — TRWD, AMWA, UNRMWA, City of Tyler, or USACE depending on the lake

We run all three submittals. On a truly private pond fully contained on private land, federal regulation may not apply — but state water-quality and floodplain rules usually still do. We assess that at the site visit.

Our equipment reaches 10–20 ft of working depth depending on the dredge type and site access. Within that range, we can typically restore a lake bottom to its original design depth or to whatever depth the bathymetric survey indicates is achievable.

Past 20 ft, you're into specialty deep-cut dredging — different equipment, different cost structure. We'll tell you honestly at the survey whether it's worth pursuing.

Five signs to look for:

• Boats running aground in spots that used to be deep
• Aquatic weeds spreading where there used to be open water
• Water that looks more brown than blue year-round
• Bass populations declining (lake too shallow to maintain summer dissolved oxygen)
• Last dredge was more than 15 years ago

If two or more apply, request a survey. We probe on a grid at no charge and tell you honestly whether you need to act now or in two more years.