Where did the water come from, and how do I fix it?

It's ironic that we need water to survive; we recharge each morning with it in the shower, and curse the heavens when there isn't enough to provide for our lawn and plants.  But as any homeowner knows, water can be your biggest enemy in your house.  Just ask the people of New Orleans, or the Mississippi plane, or anyone with a broken pipe or leaky faucet.

The next few months were spent in anguish reassessing how to get water away from my house.

The first thing I did was talk to as many neighbors on my street.  I was actually really happy to find many who had similar stories to mine: during times of heavy, heavy rain, their basements would flood.

Part of it was certainly the soil.  Our subdivision was once a cow pasture, with a swamp at the end of the street.  The ground is all clay, which doesn't soak up and retain water.

But another problem was the sewers.  A neighbor across the street discovered this.  Frustrated that his basement would fill with water during heavy rains, he literally set up a lawn chair in his basement and watched it overnight, trying to understand what was happening.  He soon realized that the problem was from the water table being so incredibly high and saturated that the water would seep up through the floor of the basement.

When the contractors built most of our houses in the late 70's & early 80's, they put weeping tile around the exterior of the houses.  Not really a "tile" in the traditional sense of the word, it's a perforated plastic tube that lies next to the house, allowing water to seep into the tube.  Water will move horizontally toward the path of least resistance.  So, when it rains around your house, the water hits this tile and moves away from your house instead of pooling at the bottom and trying to bust through your concrete walls.  It's a great system that works wonderfully.

The issue in my neighborhood, however, is that when the builders hooked this tile into the main storm sewer lines, they ran it parallel to the 8 foot depth of the storm sewers.

On those rare occasions when the heavens opened up and it rained cats & dogs, the sewers would fill up faster than the water that was seeping though the soil around the houses.  The water would move toward the path of least resistance, which in this case was BACK TOWARDS the houses.  Each house would get so saturated around the base of the poured concrete that water would move up through any tiny crack it could find.  The fancy term for this is "hydrostatic pressure".

This brilliant neighbor called a large plumbing company, and they agreed: the only way to fix the problem would be to dig 8 feet into the earth, find this pipe, and cap it off.

It all made sense all of the sudden.  I knew the cause of the water, now it was time to fix it.

Being a guy who likes to do things myself, I looked around for evidence of the pipe.  I lifted up the grate of the catchbasin in front of the house hoping to find an inlet -- nope.  I pried up the manhole cover and peered down but quickly realized I had no experience in sewage removal and placed it right back where I found it.  Next I went to the township for plans.  All the plans were in the process of getting digitized, but our street had somehow gotten tossed years ago.  That lead me to the county road commission offices, who also couldn't help me.  They only had generalized plans for the whole storm sewer system, nothing as detailed as I needed.

The next day I saw a neighbor at the store and asked what company she'd used.  McDonald Plumbing, she said.  I set up a consultation appointment, and the head of the company arrived with plans of our neighborhood unlike anyone else.  Apparently, he'd somehow gotten a copy years ago from the original developers and was guarding the plans like a hawk.  He stepped off where he thought the pipe would be: directly under my driveway.  Well, I guess this wasn't a job I was gonna do myself.

I hired him on the spot.  A few weeks later, a caravan of large trucks and tractors showed up at my house.  A large backhoe began digging right next to the driveway and was able to access the pipe without having to tear up any concrete.  After about 30 minutes, he found the pipe, capped it off, and ran it straight to the surface, leaving it about a foot underground in case I needed to ever access it again.

Meanwhile, part two of the operation was installing a sump pump to get the water from the foundation out from the house.  After some investigation, it seemed that pervious owners of the house had flooding issues, because we found interior tiling around the edges of the walls.  Based on the cut lines in the concrete floor, we followed this all the way to a drainpipe by the washer/dryer.  They'd hooked this up to flow into the sanitary sewer many years before, a practice that is certainly illegal now.  McDonald installed the new sump in the ground, hooked it into the existing interior tiling, and ran the discharge out the side of my house toward my back yard.

It was done!  No longer would I have to worry about backflow issues.  Little did I know, the work was far from over...