The words that come up on a demo, dirt, or drainage job in central Illinois, in plain English.
No jargon for its own sake — just the demolition terms and excavation terms that actually affect your job, your permit, and your bill, explained the way we'd explain them standing in your driveway.
National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants — the federal rule that governs how asbestos is handled during demolition. It sets when a pre-demo asbestos survey and a 10-day notice to the state are required. Single-family homes (four units or fewer) are generally NESHAP-exempt; larger and commercial structures are not.
Full explainer →An inspection of an older structure before demolition to find asbestos-containing materials — old siding, shingles, floor tile, and pipe wrap. Structures built before about 1980 are the ones to check.
Our demolition work →Uncontaminated broken concrete, brick, rock, and soil that can go to a CCDD fill site instead of a landfill. Clean fill disposes cheaper than mixed debris, which is why keeping the concrete stream clean lowers cost.
Full explainer →Taking a structure apart in pieces — to save materials, protect an adjacent structure, or remove just part of a building. Slower and more careful than knocking the whole thing down.
Full explainer →Bringing a structure down with heavy equipment — an excavator or dozer works it down in a controlled sequence, then the debris is sorted, metal separated for scrap, and the rest hauled off. It is the standard method for nearly every barn, garage and outbuilding in central Illinois.
Our demolition work →The per-ton charge a landfill or transfer station charges to accept debris. It's a real cost driver on a demo job — the more that goes to the landfill instead of a clean-fill site, the higher the bill.
Full explainer →Illinois' free utility-locate service. You call JULIE (or dial 811) before you dig and the utilities send someone to mark buried gas, electric, water, and communication lines so nobody hits one.
Full explainer →Value recovered from steel and metal — a grain bin, a mobile-home frame, structural steel — that can be sold for scrap and applied against the removal cost, lowering the net price.
Full explainer →The two common farm silo types. A Harvestore is the tall blue glass-fused-to-steel silo; a stave silo is built from stacked concrete blocks banded with steel hoops. Each one comes down a different way.
Grain bin & silo removal →Filling an excavation — a removed pool, a basement, a foundation void — in layers (lifts) and compacting each one so the ground holds grade and doesn't settle later.
Pool removal →A cheaper alternative to full inground-pool removal: punch holes in the bottom for drainage, break the top of the shell down 18–36 inches, then backfill and compact. Must be disclosed to future buyers.
Pool removal →A buried heating-oil, fuel, or septic tank left over on an old property. Abandoned tanks get dug out, pumped if needed, and hauled off — and if one shows contamination, a licensed environmental party steps in before the dirt work continues.
Tank removal →The other half of what we do is moving water. These are the words that come up when somebody is standing in a wet yard or a field that won’t dry — and knowing them makes it a lot easier to tell whether you’re being quoted the right fix.
Perforated pipe buried below the root zone that lets water soak in and carries it off to an outlet. The old lines around here are clay in short sections; newer ones are corrugated plastic. “Tile” is the farm word for it — there’s no actual tile involved in a modern line.
Drain tile repair →Where a tile line daylights into a ditch, creek, or waterway. It’s the first place to look when a system quits: if the outlet is crushed, buried, silted shut, or washed out, everything upstream backs up no matter how good the rest of the line is.
Drain tile repair →A vertical pipe running from a buried tile line up to the surface in a low spot, so ponded water can drop straight into the tile instead of sitting until it evaporates. Farmers also call the grated top a surface inlet. They plug with trash and stalks and are a common reason a field starts holding water again.
Drain tile repair →The grated or beehive intake sitting at ground level on top of a riser, letting surface water into the tile. Sized and screened so it takes water without swallowing residue — too open and it plugs, too tight and it won’t take the rain.
Drainage work →A hole washed open where a tile line has failed under pressure — often at a joint, a crushed spot, or the outlet. You’ll see a soft spot, a sinkhole, or water surfacing where it shouldn’t. It gets worse every rain until it’s dug up and spliced.
Drain tile repair →Perforated pipe laid in a gravel-filled trench, wrapped in fabric, that intercepts water moving through the soil and carries it somewhere else. Shorter and shallower than field tile, and the usual answer for a wet foundation wall, a soggy yard, or a hillside seep.
French drains →The perforated pipe that runs around the outside of a foundation footing, in stone, to keep groundwater from stacking up against the basement wall. On a new build it goes in before backfill; on an existing house it means excavating the wall to put one in.
Basement waterproofing →A boxed inlet set flush in a low spot in a lawn, with a grate on top and a pipe out the side. It gives standing water somewhere to go. The sump at the bottom catches silt and leaves so they don’t travel down the line — which is also why it needs cleaning out.
Drainage work →A shallow, wide, grassed channel shaped into the ground to carry surface water away without cutting a gully. No pipe involved — it’s pure grading. Often the cheapest real fix when there’s somewhere downhill for the water to go.
Grading →A broad, shaped, seeded channel run down the natural draw of a field so concentrated runoff has a stable path off the ground instead of cutting a ditch through the crop. NRCS practice 412. Rebuilt when it silts in or starts gullying.
Grassed waterways →Water and Sediment Control Basin — a small earthen berm built across a draw that holds runoff back briefly and lets it out slowly through a buried pipe, so the water leaves without taking the topsoil with it. NRCS practice 638.
Waterways & NRCS earthwork →An earthen ridge and channel built on the contour of a slope to break one long run of water into shorter ones. Shortening the slope is what stops the erosion. NRCS practice 600.
Waterways & NRCS earthwork →Pipe that carries a ditch or creek under a driveway, lane, or road so water keeps moving and the crossing stays put. Sized to the water coming at it — undersize it and it washes the drive out, and in most townships the size and the permit are the road district’s call, not yours.
Culvert repair & replacement →The concrete or metal collar on the end of a culvert. It holds the bank back, keeps the pipe from creeping, and stops water from undercutting the ends — which is what kills most culverts long before the pipe itself gives out.
Culvert repair & replacement →The slope a pipe or channel is laid at, and the whole ballgame in drainage. Water only moves if there’s fall from where it is to where it’s allowed to go. Too little and it stands in the line; too much and it runs fast enough to scour. A line that has “lost grade” has settled and now holds water instead of carrying it.
Drainage work →Wherever the water is legally and physically allowed to end up — a road ditch, a creek, a waterway. Every drainage job is limited by it. No outlet, no drainage: that’s the first thing we look for on a site visit, before anybody talks about pipe.
Drainage work →A detention basin holds stormwater temporarily and lets it out slowly through a controlled outlet, so it sits empty between rains. A retention basin keeps a permanent pool. Commercial sites and subdivisions are usually required to have one or the other.
Detention basins →A box with stoplogs or a gate set on a tile main that lets you choose the level the tile drains down to — held up after harvest to keep water and nitrogen in the field, dropped before fieldwork so the ground dries. The heart of controlled drainage, NRCS practice 554.
Conservation drainage →The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s written spec for a conservation practice, each with a number — 412 waterway, 600 terrace, 638 WASCOB, 606 subsurface drain. If a job is going through a conservation program, it gets built to that standard or it doesn’t count.
NRCS practice standards →Two different trades. Repair and replacement — finding a break, digging it up, splicing the run, rebuilding an outlet or riser — is excavator work, and it’s ours. Installing a whole new system on designed spacing across a field is done with a tile plow by a tiling outfit, which we are not. The test is simple: ground that used to drain and now doesn’t is almost always a repair.
Drain tile repair →NESHAP is the federal asbestos rule that decides whether a survey and a 10-day notice to the state are required before anything comes down. Single-family homes of four units or fewer are generally NESHAP-exempt; larger residential and commercial structures are not. We tell you which side of that line your building falls on before we schedule the job.
It depends on the structure. Older buildings can carry asbestos, lead paint or other hazards, and we recommend a pre-demolition inspection any time there is doubt, with proper abatement handled before tear-down. A single-family house is generally exempt from the federal survey requirement; a commercial building is not.
Both are machine work; the difference is sequence. A controlled teardown works the structure down in a planned order — high side first, roof released before the walls, nothing dropped toward what is standing nearby. That is how we take a building down. Mechanical demolition is the broader term for any machine teardown, and every farm and residential job we run falls under it.
CCDD stands for Clean Construction and Demolition Debris — uncontaminated concrete, brick, rock and soil. CCDD goes to a permitted CCDD site rather than a landfill, which is a different destination and a different fee than mixed debris. Sorting the clean material out of the pile is part of how a teardown gets priced.
The tipping fee is what the landfill or transfer station charges to take the load, usually by the ton. It is a real cost on every teardown that produces mixed debris, and it moves with what the structure is made of — which is why what we haul matters as much as what we tear down.
Scrap offset is the value of the steel that comes out of a teardown — roofing, grain bin sheeting, structural steel — hauled to a scrapyard rather than a landfill. It reduces the tonnage going to the tip and can take some weight off the disposal side of the job.
Ask Levi — the man running the machine, not a call center. Straight answers, free on-site estimates.
📞 (217) 809-0779