After a storm cuts through a yard, the damage rarely looks the way people expect. It's not usually one big hole — it's a channel where water found the path of least resistance, a soft undermined edge along a patio or fence line, and a pile of somebody's topsoil sitting in a spot 30 feet away where it clearly doesn't belong. We deliver fill for this kind of repair regularly in both Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver, and the yards that get fixed once, correctly, look very different a year later from the yards where someone just shoveled fill into the low spot and called it done.
This is a different problem than preventing erosion before it happens. That's a planning problem — grading, groundcover, and drainage design on a yard that hasn't failed yet. What we're covering here is what to do after the storm has already happened and you're standing in front of a washed-out channel, a caved-in patio edge, or a slope that slid. The repair sequence is different, and the mistake we see most often — dumping fill straight into an active wash zone without dealing with the water — is specific to this reactive situation.
Assess the Damage Before You Order Anything
The single biggest mistake after a storm is filling the washout before figuring out why water went there in the first place. If you backfill a channel and the water source hasn't changed — a downspout still dumping onto that spot, a neighboring lot still draining onto yours, a driveway still funneling runoff into the same low corner — the new fill washes out again in the next rain, sometimes faster than the original damage happened because loose, freshly placed fill compacts and erodes more easily than settled native soil.
Walk the property, ideally during or right after a rain if it's safe to do so, and follow the water. Look for the entry point (where water comes onto your property or concentrates from your own roof and hardscape), the path (where it accelerated or narrowed), and the exit point (where it left, and what it carried with it). A washout at the base of a downspout with no splash block or extension is a different fix than a gully cutting across a slope where two properties' runoff converges. Both need fill eventually, but only one needs fill as the first step.
Shallow Surface Washout vs. Deep Gully Cut
Storm damage generally falls into one of two categories, and they call for different materials and different amounts of work.
Shallow surface washout
This is a few inches of topsoil stripped off, exposed roots or a thin channel across the lawn, usually from sheet flow during a heavy rain rather than concentrated flow. It's a straightforward regrade: clear any debris, loosen the compacted channel bottom slightly so new material bonds, backfill with topsoil or a topsoil-over-fill combination, and reseed or sod. Most of these repairs run under a couple of cubic yards.
Deep gully cut
This is a channel that's cut down 12 inches or more, often with exposed subsoil, undermined edging, or a root system left hanging in open air. Topsoil alone won't hold here — it doesn't have the density to resist the next flow event and it's more expensive to use for bulk fill than it needs to be. A gully cut usually calls for clean fill dirt or structural fill to rebuild the bulk of the profile, capped with 3-4 inches of topsoil for the growing layer. If the gully is on a slope, or if it's cut close enough to a foundation, patio slab, or retaining wall that the structure's base has been exposed or undermined, this is also where you should be thinking about redirecting the water — a swale, a French drain, or in some cases a small retaining structure — rather than just refilling and hoping the next storm is gentler.
Why Fill Alone Doesn't Fix a Wash Zone
We have customers who order fill for the same spot in their yard every year, sometimes every storm season. It's almost always the same root cause: nobody addressed where the water was actually coming from. Fill dirt restores grade. It does not change hydrology. If a downspout, a neighboring slope, a driveway apron, or a compacted clay layer is still directing water at 15 gallons a minute into the same six-foot stretch of yard, new fill in that stretch is a temporary patch, not a repair.
The fix doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes it's a $40 downspout extension that moves discharge 8 feet further from the house. Sometimes it's cutting a shallow swale across the yard to intercept water before it reaches the problem area and carry it to a spot where it can disperse or reach an existing drain. On steeper lots, especially in the Front Range foothills or on DFW's rolling clay terrain, a French drain along the uphill side of the repair area intercepts subsurface flow that a surface regrade alone won't stop. If you're not sure which of these applies, that's worth figuring out before the fill truck shows up — it's a lot cheaper to add a swale during the regrade than to reorder fill next spring for the same six feet of yard.
Once the water path is handled, the long-term prevention side — vegetation choice, slope percentages, mulch and groundcover strategy — is covered in our erosion control guide, and if the underlying issue is closer to a grading or drainage design problem than a one-time storm event, our drainage problems guide walks through diagnosing that.
Sediment Cleanup: The Soil Went Somewhere
Every cubic yard of soil a storm moves out of your yard lands somewhere else. We've delivered fill to plenty of properties where the actual repair had two parts: bringing in new fill to rebuild the washed-out area, and hauling out sediment that had deposited somewhere it shouldn't be — against a fence line, in a low corner of a patio, in a storm drain inlet, or on a neighbor's property.
Don't skip this step. Sediment sitting against a foundation or fence retains moisture and can contribute to rot or additional erosion later. Sediment in a storm drain inlet is often a code or HOA issue and can worsen local flooding for the whole street if it's not cleared. And if displaced soil landed on a neighbor's lot, that's worth addressing directly and promptly — it's a much easier conversation before the next storm compounds it than after. Depending on volume, this can mean loading it out with the same truck that's delivering your new fill, which is often more efficient than a separate cleanup trip.
How Much Fill Do You Need
Storm damage repairs vary enormously in size, but the math is the same geometry as any fill job: length times width times depth in feet, divided by 27, gives you cubic yards. A few real scenarios:
A washed-out drainage channel 20 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 1 foot deep works out to 40 cubic feet, or about 1.5 cubic yards — small enough that it's often a partial load combined with another delivery in the area.
A deeper gully cut, 30 feet long and 3 feet wide, averaging 18 inches deep, comes to roughly 5 cubic yards of bulk fill, plus a lighter topsoil cap for the top few inches where grass or groundcover needs to establish.
A significant slope failure or a full-yard regrade after a major flood event — the kind where a whole hillside slumped or a large section of yard needs to be reshaped, not just patched — can run 20 to 50-plus cubic yards. As an example, a slope repair spanning 40 feet long by 12 feet wide by an average of 18 inches of fill comes out to about 27 cubic yards, which typically takes two loads from a tandem dump truck (10 cubic yards each, and the size that fits most residential driveways) or one load from a tri-axle (16 cubic yards).
Add 10-15% to any of these figures for compaction, since loose fill settles once it's placed and worked. Our yardage calculator runs this math for your specific dimensions if you're not confident estimating depth and width across an irregular washout — storm damage rarely cuts a clean rectangle, so measure the deepest and shallowest points and average them.
What to Use — and What Not To
For the bulk of a repair, clean fill dirt is the right call in most yards — it's the most economical option and compacts well for regrading. If the damaged area is within a few feet of a foundation, patio slab, retaining wall, or driveway, use structural fill instead, since it's engineered to compact to a higher density and resist settling under and near load-bearing structures. Cap either one with 3-4 inches of topsoil wherever you need grass, sod, or plantings to take root again.
What not to use: don't backfill a washout with the debris the storm generated — broken mulch, waterlogged organic matter, chunks of asphalt or concrete that washed loose. These won't compact evenly and create voids that show up as a new low spot after the first hard rain. Don't use unscreened fill with construction debris, large rocks, or clay clods mixed in for the same reason — it settles unevenly. And don't rely on topsoil alone to rebuild a deep gully; it's not dense enough for structural bulk fill and it's more expensive per yard than clean fill for a job that doesn't need topsoil's organic content until the top few inches.
Timing: Why Waiting Makes It Worse
A partially repaired erosion channel doesn't sit still between storms — it gets worse with every additional rain event, because the exposed, loosened soil at the edges of an existing washout erodes faster than undisturbed ground did before the first storm hit. This is the main reason we push same-day and next-day delivery for storm repair work rather than treating it like a standard landscaping order.
We offer same-day delivery on orders placed before 10 AM, with standard delivery running 24-48 hours. After a real storm, that speed genuinely matters — an eroded slope or a washed-out drainage path with no repair sitting between it and the next front moving through is a channel that will be measurably deeper the next time you look at it. Getting fill in place, even as an interim repair while you plan a more complete drainage fix, is worth doing before the next rain rather than after.
This plays out a little differently in our two markets. DFW's storm pattern tends toward sudden, intense flash-flood-style rain that can drop several inches in an hour and overwhelm yard drainage that handles normal rain fine. Front Range storm damage more often comes from spring snowmelt runoff saturating slopes over days or weeks, plus occasional intense summer hailstorms and downpours that hit clay soils already compacted from a dry summer. Both patterns create real repair demand — just on different timelines, which is part of why we keep material staged in both metros rather than routing everything through a single yard.
What This Costs
Pricing is per cubic yard, delivered, with no hidden fees. In DFW: clean fill dirt runs $10/yard, topsoil $17/yard, structural fill $20/yard, sand $22/yard, and gravel or crushed rock $25/yard. In Denver: clean fill dirt is $15/yard, topsoil $22/yard, structural fill $25/yard, sand $27/yard, and gravel or crushed rock $30/yard.
For scale, the small 1.5-yard channel repair example above runs somewhere around $15-25 in material in DFW depending on whether you use fill or topsoil, and the 27-yard slope repair example runs several hundred dollars in material before labor and equipment. We can usually tell you which truck size fits a given job over the phone once we know rough dimensions — a tandem dump truck carries 10 cubic yards and fits most residential driveways, a tri-axle carries 16 yards, and an end dump or side dump trailer carries 18 yards for larger regrades.
After the Repair: Don't Let It Happen Again
Once the fill is placed, compacted, and graded, the repair isn't finished until there's groundcover holding it in place. Bare regraded soil is more vulnerable to erosion than the established lawn or bed that was there before the storm, so seed, sod, or mulch it promptly, and consider an erosion control blanket or jute netting on anything steeper than about a 15% slope while grass establishes. If the storm damage exposed a drainage design flaw rather than just being one unusually hard rain, it's worth working through fixing the underlying drainage problem and reading through our erosion control guide for the longer-term slope and groundcover strategy, so the next storm is a non-event instead of another repair call.
If you're standing in front of a washed-out yard right now, we can help you figure out which category of repair you're dealing with and get material moving fast. Call us at (469) 253-2403 in Dallas-Fort Worth or (720) 577-5016 in Denver, or email support@filldirtnearme.net. We're open Monday through Saturday, 7 AM to 5 PM, and if you get the order in before 10 AM we can often have fill on-site the same day — which, after a storm, is usually the difference between a repair and a repeat repair.