Bigham Dozin & Diggin
Verified against state license rosterSeptic Installation · Septic System Repair
- Phone
- 423-496-7908
- Website
- none
Polk County
Listed by where the business is, not by who it says it serves. Every operator here holds a current state permit, and the address it is placed by comes from the state's own published list — so this is a checkable claim rather than a service-area promise. A Tennessee installer permit is valid statewide, so operators further out can work here too; these are simply the ones closest to you.
Septic Installation · Septic System Repair
Septic Installation · Septic System Repair
Septic Installation · Septic System Repair
Septic Installation · Septic System Repair
The USDA has already rated this ground for exactly one use: a septic tank absorption field. Within 4 miles of Copperhill — 32,005 acres across 48 soil map units — it rates 75% of the land very limited for that use and 11.1% somewhat limited, and almost none with no limitation at all.
A rating on its own tells you nothing you can act on. The reasons do, and around Copperhill the leading one is slope on 64% of the mapped area, followed by seepage, bottom layer on 27.5%. In full:
| Limiting feature | Share of area | What it means on site |
|---|---|---|
| Slope | 64% | The ground is too steep for a conventional field |
| Seepage, bottom layer | 27.5% | The layer beneath the trench is porous enough that effluent could reach groundwater without being filtered |
| Depth to bedrock | 12.7% | Bedrock is too shallow to fit a trench above it |
| Flooding | 5.1% | The site floods often enough to matter |
| Depth to saturated zone | 4.3% | A seasonal water table sits too close to the surface |
Shares overlap: most soils here are limited for more than one reason at once, so these do not sum to 86.1%.
The named soils and land types that make up most of the ground around Copperhill. Evard alone accounts for 27.7% of it.
| Soil or land type | Share | Drainage | Slope | Depth to bedrock | Septic rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evard | 27.7% | Well drained | 5 to 60% | None in profile | Very limited |
| Gullied land | 16.5% | — | 5 to 35% | None in profile | Very limited |
| Clifton | 11.7% | Well drained | 6 to 35% | None in profile | Very limited |
| Minor component | 8.7% | — | — | None in profile | Not rated |
| Cowee | 8.6% | Well drained | 10 to 60% | 26 in | Very limited |
“None in profile” means SSURGO records no bedrock or other restrictive layer within the depth it describes, not that none exists.
A drain field has to be close to level. Effluent is distributed along a trench by gravity or by pump, and on a grade it runs to the low end, overloads it, and surfaces there. Around Copperhill enough of the ground is steep that field placement tends to decide house placement rather than the other way round — the usable field area is often a bench or a shoulder some distance from the best building site, and the connection between them is a cost. It is worth knowing which part of a lot is the field before you fall in love with a view.
Part of the ground around Copperhill is limited not because water moves too slowly but because it moves too freely: fractured limestone beneath the trench that carries effluent down to groundwater before the soil has treated it. Much of Tennessee's limestone country is karst — sinkholes, solution channels, springs — and a great many households here draw drinking water from private wells. A site that percolates beautifully can still be refused for exactly that reason, and the separation distances between a field, a sinkhole and a well are among the things a soil consultant is actually looking for.
Area of interest: a 4-mile radius around the USGS Geographic Names centre point for Copperhill (GNIS 1281278, 34.9890, -84.3708), chosen because five of this state's communities are unincorporated and have no boundary to use, and because the lots that need a septic permit are in the ring around a town rather than inside it. Soil from USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access, SSURGO interpretation “ENG - Septic Tank Absorption Fields”, area-weighted by mapped acreage and by each component's share of its map unit. Survey areas: Fannin and Union Counties, Georgia (2025-08-27), Cherokee County, North Carolina (2025-09-03), Polk County, Tennessee (2025-08-29). Retrieved 2026-09-09.
This is a survey, not a soil map for your lot. A permit needs a high-intensity map of the specific parcel, produced by a TDEC-approved soil consultant — see soil map vs perc test.
Septic permitting in Polk County is administered by the State of Tennessee, not the county health department. See the Polk County detail →