My Basement- Part Two

Except for a couple of dry months in the winter, my basement is a damp basement. If it were not for the sump pump that sits in a pit along the south wall, “damp” would be an overly optimistic goal. But aside from one disappointing week several years ago when I was on vacation, the pump had performed reasonably well. On the week I had been away, the pump had decided it had done all it could and now it was up to someone else.

This came as a complete surprise to me, as I had never heard any complaining, from the bearings or otherwise. But quit it had, leaving me to find a replacement to deal with the minor pond that had been forming while I was away.

My sole criteria for the old guy’s replacement was that the new guy fit in the same trench. Anything more than that was and is beyond my expertise sump pump-wise. So the new guy was quickly found and unceremoniously dumped into the same pit that his predecessor had called “home” before him. With one or two exceptions, the new guy has performed admirably over the years, particularly in light of the feeble interview process he went through to get the job.

Like all problems with sump pumps, they only rear their heads when you need them the most. Who bothers to check a sump pump when it’s not raining? Not me, that’s for sure. Usually the problem becomes apparent to me as I’m staring out the window at the torrential downpour. I slowly come to the realization that a) I should have heard the pump turn on long ago- and I haven’t, or b)The constant humming in the background that I’ve been hearing has been coming from the sump pump- and it should have taken a breath a long time ago.

There was a time several years ago, where the rod holding the float on the new pump disintegrated, leaving the pump to run incessantly. This, I naturally discovered in one of the aforementioned torrential rains and it was doing neither of us any good. I knew it was only a matter of time before the new guy burned himself out, leaving me to go through the same rigorous process that I had gone through several years earlier, back when I first hired him for the job.

I unplugged the pump and pulled him from his pit, replacing the decayed rod with a rod I cannibalized from his predecessor. Then, I lowered the new guy back into the pit and got him running again. This did the trick and reinforced my notion that it doesn’t pay to throw anything away (but only when it comes to my stuff). By the way, there are few things more exciting than dropping a pump into an overflowing pit of water as the water surrounds your feet while you’re trying to plug the sump pump back in.

But the pump has performed admirably up until last summer, when something changed. The heavy rains of last summer were streaming more freely into my basement than they ever had before. Even more disconcerting was the fact that pieces of leaves and other debris were washing in along with it. Under the best of conditions the new guy would have found it impossible to keep up with these deluges- and these were not the best of conditions. I found myself several times having to pull him from his pit and clean leaves and grass clippings out of his workings before submerging him in my rapidly flooding basement.

Eventually, I built a cage around the pump that acted as a strainer for the rivers of debris that now accompanied every heavy rain, and while this solved the problem of having to leave work early to resuscitate my old friend, it did nothing to answer the question of why my basement was now the preferred route for establishing a major body of water.

Over the next few storms, I was able to track the most major incoming stream from a corner of my house- not far from the pump’s home. The view of this corner had been previously blocked, not only by the typical obstacles which nest in the basement, but also by the oil tank. Once I uprooted the piles of treasures, I could see that there was an area in the corner wall, behind the tank, where cinder blocks had replaced the brick. In the floor below it, was an opening from which water was rushing to freedom.

The culprit- note the cinder blocks above.

It’s odd to live in a house for so long and not know that something like this existed. What was the point of this, and why was it suddenly a problem? I decided that this hole in the floor was most likely there to relieve the stress on the foundation during heavy rains- stress that had buckled the old brick previously in the corner. Why was this happening now? Obviously, it was because my foundation was disintegrating. At least, that was the biggest worst case scenario I could come up with- which is how I tend to react to these types of things.

I covered the hole with a weighted bucket as best I could, not fully comfortable that this was the best course of action. It mattered little since the water came in anyway. I examined the outside of the foundation, looking for signs of depressions or major sinkholes. For better or worse, everything looked normal.

Eventually, the heavy rains passed and winter came and with it, a few dry months of relief which allowed me to not deal with the problem.

This summer, the rains came back, and with them, to no one’s surprise but mine, came the floods. During one of the brief dry spells, I was having one of my infrequent conversations with my next door neighbor. He and I share a driveway and, I suspect, a sewer line below it. Anyway, somehow the conversation turned to all of the rain he got in his basement from the last storm and how this has been a bigger problem for him for the last year or so. Apparently, he felt the sewer was backing up.

I didn't quite get this and pressed him several times until it became one of those uncomfortable situations where I am certain that he either felt that I was an idiot or that I was calling him one. Finally it became clear to me that he wasn't talking about the sewage line. He was talking about the storm drain. Apparently his house, like mine, has a little hole in the corner of the basement and this is connected to the storm drain. The water was supposed to be draining out, not in. I had never heard of this before and the logic of it completely escaped me.

Why, I asked, would we even need such a thing, since we both have sump pumps? If the drain sat lower than the pump, I might be fooled into thinking it served any purpose beyond allowing a backed-up storm drain from the street to flood into my basement. But since the sump pump sits lower, shouldn't it be taking care of any water before it ever reached the drain?

He didn't follow my supposed logic, and since we’re neighbors, I decided not to push my luck any further. I had already come too close to the edge with the plumbing terminology. Instead, I called the Public Works Department on the following day, and they cleaned the storm drain the day following that.

We've had several more days of heavy rain since then and I’m back to having my extremely damp, but pretty much lake-free basement. For now.