Septic Tank Pumping in Lawrence County, IL

• Coverage includes Lawrenceville, Bridgeport, Sumner, St. Francisville, Birds, Russellville and Allison Township.
• Crews run US 50, Route 1, Route 33 and Route 250 across the county.
• The health department's environmental health office answers at (618) 943-3302.
• Before you call: have the bedroom count and any old permit; the application asks for both.
• Farm lanes in wet springs: heavy pump trucks can rut soft ground, so dry-weather scheduling saves yard repair.

• Routine pump-outs on farm homes
• Aerobic treatment unit service
• Pumping before a home sale
• Locating tanks and adding risers
• Repairs after a seepage field fails in clay
• Surface-discharge system service, where allowed

• Pumping: HomeGuide's national figures run $300 to $700 a visit, or 30 to 70 cents a gallon of tank capacity, so a 1,000-gallon farmhouse tank lands near $500.
• County fee: the Lawrence County Health Department's plan review application lists a $100 permit fee for a private sewage disposal system.
• Aerobic units and sand filters, common in tight clay, need more frequent service than a plain tank, which can double yearly upkeep against HomeGuide's $300 to $700 pump-out range.
• Method: HomeGuide's per-gallon range scaled to your tank, plus the county fee. Long drives across farm roads and local disposal fees add cost.

• Step 1, apply: submit the plan review application to the Lawrence County Health Department; it lists a $100 permit fee.
• Step 2, soil: the application says a copy of the soil investigation results must be provided for a subsurface system.
• Step 3, setbacks: Section 905 of the Illinois Private Sewage Disposal Code, in its Appendix A table, puts a septic tank at least 50 feet and a seepage field at least 75 feet from a well in clay, silt and loam soils.
• Step 4, surface discharge: the application notes that a system discharging to waters of the United States needs coverage under the Illinois general permit ILG62.
• Step 5, inspection: the owner signs to notify the department before backfilling over a new system.

• Clay and silt loam: much of the county has fine silty soils over clay with a perched water table, which absorbs effluent slowly.
• USDA NRCS soil survey data rate 92.9% of the Lawrence County survey area (IL101) as very limited for septic absorption fields.
• Floodplains along the Wabash and Embarras rivers flood in spring, and soils near the river stay wet for weeks.
• Census ACS counts about 6,407 housing units with a median year built of 1963, one of the older housing stocks on this site.
• Freezing winters and heavy spring rain both stress fields in clay soils.
• Reading the soil: silty clay near the Wabash River bottoms and along the Embarras River sits on a high water table, while the upland till plains toward Sumner have a dense claypan a foot or two down. Both slow effluent, so many rural homes use aerobic units, sand filters or surface-discharge systems instead of a plain trench.
• Oil field leases are scattered across the county, and older farmhouses near them sometimes have tanks no one has located in years; probing and digging add time to the first visit.

Lawrenceville · Bridgeport · Sumner · St. Francisville · Birds · Russellville