Water Tries to Get Into Your House
In my last post I told you about my pool table buddy’s basement being flooded.
It turns out he learned that in the northwest where he was the hillside neighborhood flooding had occurred multiple times. It rains like crazy where he is in Oregon.
Some people in his neighborhood did major excavation, backhoe and front end loader stuff, not typically seen in an older established neighborhood and certainly not all at once.
Talking to the homeowners revealed the underlying problem. On the foothills where our neighborhood was built, there was a water impermeable layer of clay about ten or twelve feet underground, as well as several underground springs. When the ground became super-saturated from spring monsoon rains, as it did every five or ten or fifteen years, the water table would raise enough to enter basements six or eight feet below grade . The general cause had now been identified, what’s the solution?
The neighbors who were excavating were digging down to the clay layer on the high side of the houses. They would put in a four inch perforated French drain pipe and slant the pipe out toward the road. This was covered by a couple of feet of one inch stone, landscape cloth the keep dirt out of the rocks and the whole thing was back filled.
My buddy did the same basic thing but routed the drain pipe into a ten foot deep, two foot diameter conduit pipe with a sump pump at the bottom.
The water was then pumped off harmlessly to a lower area of the property.
Water is something they have in Oregon and you just have to make sure that any house has a “good hat” and “good boots” (good roof, good foundation). Not really a big deal.