Erosion Management Services Review

This post contains two reviews for a company I hired to deal with an erosion problem in my yard. The original review resulted in the company coming back to improve their work. They did not ask me to update, nor remove, my original review. But I think it is important to provide an update, Google reviews wouldn’t even let me write all of the words I originally wanted to write (I had to revise my review a bit to meet their word/character limit), and archive.org is not allowed to archive Google reviews pages. So the original review will be replicated below, and then my updated review (which I will replace my original review with on Google’s site).

Original Review §

This review was left in February of 2025 for work performed in June (or July) of 2024. The images referenced in the review are included at the bottom of this section.

First things first: I didn’t want to write this review because there were mistakes made on both sides; I was going to let bygones be bygones. Combined with the overall summary that they did better than the first company I hired for the same work, this is why I am giving a 2 instead of a 1 star rating. Now on to the actual review.

In early 2022 I contacted this company to spec out an erosion project in my front yard. A year prior, I had had a landscaping company put in a berm and drain to catch and divert water from washing out my yard. That berm failed due to shoddy work. So the project manager came out to my house, we reviewed my project, and he made several suggestions about what to do. Unfortunately, I had to put the project on hold a couple of days later due to being caught up in a mass layoff. Fast forward to 2023 when I have had a new job for a while and am back in a financial position to do this work: I call them back to say I’m ready to start the project again. Initially, they just wanted to come out and do it. But it had been over a year, so I was adamant that they come out and re-review the project. That should have been my warning, but the project manager came out and looked at it again with me. He clearly didn’t take any notes the first time (which seems to be modus operandi), because when I asked about some of the details HE had suggested the last time, he acted like I was asking for something unheard of.

Anyway, we pushed through with the project. They rebuilt the berm, added some small river rocks around the drain, tied another drain in from further up the hill, and added a French drain around one corner of my driveway. Once the work was completed, the crew simply vanished. They never knocked on my door to let me know they were finished. And the project manager had zero intention of coming back to review the work; he was content to sign-off on the work from the pictures his crew sent him. When I asked him to come out and review the work with me, I got a very distinct impression that I was inconveniencing him. But he did eventually come back out, and we agreed that some things had been missed. His crew came back out, touched up the missing parts, and I decided to let the project be finished.

The rocks around the drain, which was the project manager’s suggestion during our very first review, were, as I understood the suggestion, meant to reinforce the berm and alleviate sediment blocking the drain. We didn’t really have any significant rains until early this year (2025), so it never got thoroughly tested. Well, the first hard, long, rain we got has resulted in the berm overflowing, and it getting washed out along with my yard. Turns out, they had covered up most of the drain with landscaping cloth and the rocks. Basically, they half-assed it. I just had to remove the rocks and cloth in order to determine if the drain was blocked ahead of our next forecasted heavy rain.

Not only that, but the French drain that was put in was supposed to catch the heavy runoff I have in that area and divert it to a lower location in my yard. As can be seen in the attached pictures, this isn’t quite working as intended. I suppose it is catching most of it, but there is still washout happening, so it clearly isn’t sufficient.

In addition to all of that, the grass seed they put down, and covered quite poorly, never grew. I spent the last few warm months of 2024 meticulously seeding and growing as much grass as I could on my own. Given it was so late, there’s still a lot to do this spring. What I discovered, is that they didn’t even seed the grass properly. They just threw some handfuls of seed on the ground and tossed some straw on top of it. They didn’t rake out any of the unfiltered soil they put down in order to give the seed something to embed into. And they didn’t give me any instructions about how to maintain the work to get any seed to grow.

In summary, I have to make a bunch of repairs myself because they didn’t do things right.

Updated Review §

I’m revising my rating from 2 stars to 3 stars. I wanted to go up to 4, but a couple of disappointments, that I will cover shortly, prevent that.

After writing my original reivew, the company reached out to determine what they might be able to do to make things right. I scheduled a time for Mike to come out and look at things with me. He agreed with me that the work was not sufficient. He actually took some notes, and had a crew out the next week to correct the issues. They built up a new berm, re-did the french drain and added a swale to it, and put down erosion blanket to ensure the grass would have a chance to grow. The next week, Mike came back out to review the work and advise me about how to nuture it until it is settled in. He also mentioned he would like to come back and apply hydroseed to the area just to make sure it really takes.

Fast forward to April 2. I received a call from Mike in which he said he would be out the following week (week of April 7) to take up the erosion blanket and apply the hydroseed. I said I was planning to take up the blanket that very day, but would wait for his crew to get it done. The next week came and went without any communication. So did the next, until I needed to get my grass cut before a trip. I spent 3 hours pulling the blanket, that I’m sure would been significantly easier two week earlier, and taking it off to the dump. I never got to cut my grass until the 23rd because that took up all the time and body I had available to get work done before my trip on the 17th. My back, unaccustomed to such work, was in pain and my finger tips and knees raw. Thankfully my back recovered over night, but I still started my trip with recovery on the other parts. I was finally able to do the work I had planned to do on the 2nd, today, the 23rd, and I still had deal with leftover blanket material (and probably will for months or years to come).

Aside from some landscaping blanket blotting my, now ineffective, original berm, the work looks great and seems to be solving the problem, albeit exacerbating another problem where the water now dumps out. I’m very pleased to have my main issue seemingly solved. But I’m disappointed that promises I didn’t ask for were never kept. Please don’t tell me you will do a thing and then never even communicate that you aren’t able to.