About Fort Wayne Culvert Company

Fort Wayne Culvert Company is a locally owned excavation outfit working roadside ditches and rural entrances in and around Fort Wayne, Indiana. We install driveway culverts, replace pipe that is finished, repair pipe that is not, build farm and field entrances, grade driveway approaches, put in creek and lane crossings, armor outlets against scour, and run commercial and subdivision culvert work. Indiana licensing and liability insurance are both current.

The part that separates a culvert that lasts from one that does not is decided before any pipe touches the ground. We start with the ditch. How many acres drain to that point, how steeply they fall, and what covers them. Row crop sheds water differently from timber, and a subdivision roof sheds it faster than either. That count sets the diameter. The driveway width sets the length. Most people have it backwards, and an entrance sized off the driveway is the single most common thing we dig back out.

After sizing comes the boring work that decides everything. A shaped trench floor and a granular bed under the barrel, so the pipe carries along its full length rather than bridging two high points. Backfill in lifts, both sides together, compacted the same on each. A foot of cover over a residential entrance and more where loaded trucks run. Flared end sections on the ends. Angular rock on fabric at the outlet. None of it shows in a photo. All of it shows in fifteen years.

Allen County makes its own demands. This is flat, heavy clay till on the western edge of the Great Black Swamp, and water here moves sideways to a ditch because it cannot move down. There is barely any fall to work with, so getting the pipe on the flow line is not a detail. It is the job. On top of that, some ditches along county roads here are legal drains under the County Surveyor and some are ordinary highway side ditches. If yours is a legal drain, a second approval applies that most owners have never heard of. We check the county's drain map before we write a number.

We also say no. A plugged pipe gets cleaned out, not replaced, and we will tell you so even though the small job pays less. We do not promise a pipe size or an approval before the road department has stood on the site. We do not promise a dig date over a running ditch. Some counties reserve parts of this work for their own crews, and where that is true we say which parts are theirs.

Call (260) 555-0166 with a question about your ditch, job or no job.