How To Handle a Flooding Basement
Hello everyone,
I’ve been busy again. We had some really heavy rain last week and we are still bailing out from it. Of course some of us didn’t have it bad but there are always those people that get stuck right in the thick of it.
I mean they get hit pretty hard with flooding, or the wind does some sort of nasty damage to their homes or property. I’m not going to grind this on to death because most of us know what I mean.
I have the pleasure of knowing many things about bailing a house out of a water scene. First thing is to get the water out of the house or from under the house and then the task of keeping it out. Water doesn’t give a hoot about what you want with it. If there is a low spot and a leak it’s going right in ruin everything in the way.
So let’s look at what I have done in the past few days. One of my customers has a multi unit apartment building and one of the units got water in it on the basement level. We got so much rain over night that the drain system couldn’t handle the flow and backed up right into this units front room. The carpet was a complete loss and had to be thrown out. The pad as well. (This is a really old building) It turns out there was a six inch floor drain right in the middle of the rooms floor covered up by carpet. They had no idea it was there. The whole rest of the downstairs stayed completely dry.
Now, there are ways to deal with this. The best way is to put a vinyl floor down and an area rug over it that will fill most of the room. That way if there is another heavy rain that causes the floor drain to back up the area rug can be cleaned and dried and returned with little disruption. The other way is to seal the drain and re carpet the room and hope there is never another source of water into the basement because if there is then the drain area will fill up and go nowhere. Then you will end up replacing the carpet yet again and possibly other furniture as well.
Another job had a minor flood under the house and it could have ruined the sale of the house. In this one the best and simplest solution is to install a sump pump in a shallow well at the lowest point under the house and plumb it to the sewer or out to a french drain in the yard. If there is a storm drain system then into that.
The main point is to get the water out of the living area and as fast as possible to avoid mold growth. If you do get mold growth then it is very important to kill it right away while you are drying the place out or it will get away from you. A very good solution is 1 cup bleach to 1 gallon of water and to keep any surface treated for mold wet with the solution for 10 to 15 minutes. You need to take precautions for your health when you clean up mold and there are plenty of web sites that will show you how top clean up mold.
Now I have another job that had water come into their basement from out of the ground due to so much rain in a short time that the ground water table rose up above the level of the basement floor and found a way into the house. So now the job will be to dig down below the floor level and install a sump pump in the path of the water to intercept it in case it happens again.
That’s all for now
Cheers
Glenn
