A Dark and Stormy night

[rowyn]

So, last night, a thunderstorm took out the power on my block, at around 10PM. Lut was nearing the end of an eight-hour taskforce in City of Heroes, and was rather annoyed not to be able to finish it.

In the middle of the night, we both wake up. Lut checks the time on the cell phone, because we're both thinking it must be almost dawn by now. No, it's 1:30.

It's still raining. The power is still out.

Lut calls the power company. The power will be back on at 4:30AM. No big deal. We should be sleeping anyway.

Except that the power's out. During a storm.

The sump pump in the basement is electric.

So, my basement flooded, again. In a new and interesting way: the sump pump overflowed.

I guess I should buy a generator.

---

I didn't sleep well after that early-morning wake up. I kept having disorienting dreams about what was happening. I dreamed, several times, that the power had come back on -- only to wake and discover that it hadn't.

I dreamed that I was talking to neighbors that I'd just met in the dream, and telling them I'd decided to sell the house and move. "I'm sick of dealing with the basement. And I never did finish unpacking, so now I won't have to."

I dreamed one of my co-workers had set up for a garage sale the night before the storm, and left everything out and uncovered when it rained. I dreamed the basement flooded again. No, wait, that part really happened. I also wheeled the lawnmower back into the garage, through the rain, at 1:30 in the morning. It gave me something to do since I couldn't sleep anyway.

Tomorrow, I'll call the city and ask them when the work on the sewer will start, and what they plan to do around my house.

Comments

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Goodness. Those sellers must be gleeful over their luck at passing off this house - and its basement - on some unsuspecting buyer. =P I can't even imagine what could be done about a situation like this. (Dig a moat?)

Re: Moats

[sandratayler.livejournal.com]

A family I knew almost did build a moat to solve their perpetual wet basement. Here is their solution (Which, by the way, I don't recommend.):

Dig a trench around the entire house down to the level of the foundation so that all the underground basement walls are exposed. Then get lots of tar, make it hot and slather it over the basement walls until you have a layer about an inch thick all over. Let the tar cool. Rebury everything.

As you may imagine this was an incredibly messy and tedious project. It was done mostly by their teenage sons who actually seemed to relish the fact that the tar stained everything it got near. To add to the circus, they didn't do it in one big project, but in pieces over the course of about a year.

It did seem to work, but their basement wasn't as floody as yours sounds to be.

Re: Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease

[rowyn]

I've heard of that method -- coating the outside of the foundation with some substance -- but it's not highly recommended. The biggest disadvantage to it is that, even if it succeeds at keeping the water from leaking into the basement, the pressure of the water against the walls remains. This can, potentially, cause the walls to bulge inwards (and ultimately collapse). Fixing that is even more expensive than the other methods of dealing with the original leak. O.O

The two most recommended approaches are either to dig an exterior drainage system, where the water is intercepted before it reaches the foundation and diverted downslope, or an interior one, which goes under the basement floor and diverts the water that comes into the house to the drainage tiles, which lead to a pump that puts it back outside (and downslope from the house.)

In my particular situation, the city is going to put sewers in some time in the next year or so. This may (or may not) have the effect of an exterior drainage system, in which case I'd be set. But if the city's work isn't going to resolve the problem anyway, the interior drainage system appears (surprisingly) to be the cheapest and most effective solution. Which doesn't make it *cheap*.

But it'd beat dealing with mildew and a drenched carpet every couple of months. :P

[rowyn]

It's really not that hard to fix. Relative to the cost of the whole house, it's even not all that expensive. Mostly, it's just really annoying isolating the problem.