300,000 Cubic Yards of Common Fill: A North Fort Worth Import

What a 300,000 cubic yard import actually looks like

Volume is the part everyone quotes and the part that tells you the least. 300,000 cubic yards of common fill is a number you reach one truckload at a time, over months, and the only question that matters day to day is how many loads landed and got placed. On this job that ran to more than 300 truckloads a day, roughly 5,000 cubic yards placed daily. Sustaining that means a source that can load continuously, a route that holds up under repeat traffic, and a receiving pad that never becomes the bottleneck.

Common fill is the right material for this kind of work. It is general purpose fill for bringing a site up to grade, not the spec material that goes under a structure. Where the pad needs engineered material, that is select fill, and the two are ordered and priced differently. Our guide on fill dirt versus topsoil covers where each material belongs.

Why the dozers are ours too

The reason we put two dozers and operators on this site is simple: a truck that cannot dump is a truck that is not hauling. When 300 loads a day arrive and there is nobody spreading, the trucks stack up at the gate, cycle times collapse, and the daily volume falls off a cliff. Placing and spreading as material lands keeps the dump area open and keeps every truck in the rotation moving.

Spreading is also where the fill starts becoming a pad rather than a pile. Material placed in controlled lifts and compacted as it goes is what eventually passes density testing; material dumped in a heap has to be reworked later at somebody’s cost. Our guide on soil compaction covers lift thickness, optimum moisture and what 95 percent density means in the field.

The street sweeper is not a courtesy

We also ran a street sweeper with an operator on this site. Any high volume haul tracks material onto public roads, and tracked mud is both a nuisance and a compliance problem: cities across DFW enforce it, and a job that fouls the surrounding streets invites complaints, citations and stop work risk. On a route running hundreds of loads a day, sweeping is not a nice touch at the end of the week, it is a daily part of the operation.

It also protects the relationship with the neighborhood the project is being built in, which on a residential development is worth real money to the builder.

Where the material comes from

The fill on this job moved from a David Weekley Homes project, which is the version of dirt logistics we like best: material that one site has to get rid of becomes material another site has to buy. Handled that way, the export side pays less than a landfill haul and the import side pays less than open market fill, because the yardage is not being trucked further than it has to be.

That is the whole idea behind matching sites, and it is covered in our dirt export and haul off guide. When a site cannot balance its own cut and fill, the surplus has to go somewhere; sending it to another active job instead of to a disposal site is the cheapest place for it to land. Our cut and fill guide explains why so few sites balance on their own.

Sizing a job like this before you bid it

The number that drives everything is the volume, and it comes from the grading plan, not from a guess. Compare the existing surface to the design surface, take the fill quantity, then adjust for compaction shrink so the order reflects what has to arrive rather than what ends up in place. Our earthwork calculator builds that comparison from LiDAR terrain, and the soil calculator converts a known volume into cubic yards, tons and truckloads.

Once the volume is set, the next question is trucks. Load capacity varies by truck class, and the number of loads per day is set by cycle time to the source rather than by how many trucks exist. Our guide on dump truck sizes and load capacity covers what each class carries.