Home Improvement » Foundation » Article


What to do when Disaster Strikes and Your Basement is Flooded Due to Excessive Rain

By Jason Lee
Filed under: Foundation         Words in this Post: 440



Print This Post Print This Post AddThis Feed Button

What do you do if disaster strikes and your basement or crawl space becomes flooded by excessive rain, plumbing problems, or some other emergency? Other than calling your home insurer in a blind panic, the obvious thing to do is to get all the water out. Water can damage the inner workings and foundations of your home. A flooded basement requires a high volume pump to get the water out, so you need to call a plumber who has the equipment, or rent it yourself from a hardware store. For smaller flooded areas, like crawl spaces, you can buy your own portable pump. These small, light pumps, sometimes called “trash pumps,” cost less than $75 and are well worth keeping around the house, because they’re useful for pumping water in a variety of situations.

Hook a garden hose up to one for drainage, place it in your crawl space, plug it into a secure outlet, and it will work away for as long as you need to move all of the water out of your crawl space and into an outside ditch or drainage area. After the water is gone, you can then determine what other repairs need to be made to your home.

If the flooding occurred because of a clogged sump pump, well you got to replace the sump pump. And if you don’t have a sump pump, again you will need to install a sump pump. Installing a sump pump is a job that is better left to professionals.

Here is what you can do to prevent basement flooding:

  • Consider replacing basement windows with glass block. I had one window that always leaked during heavy rainfalls. The water never damaged anything, but we decided to install glass block windows. That completely stopped the seepage and, as a bonus, warmed up the basement in the winter months.
  • Install a sump pump in the basement. Built into drain at the lowest point of the basement floor, it pumps water collected to a drainage ditch or to a drain area in your yard.
  • Install drain tiles in the yard. They collect water and carry it to a low spot in the yard farther away from the house.
  • Dig a trench around the foundation to get at the exterior walls and waterproof them.

If you have a problem with water ponding on the patio. Remove the old concrete, change the grade by bringing in sand, and after changing the slope so that the yard was lower, build a new patio. Now water would drain from the house down toward the yard. If changing the grade of the yard doesn’t solve the problem, there are several other more costly solutions.

View More Articles in Foundation. . .
Author: Jason Lee

Please Rate This Article
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

Tags: ,

 

You may also be interested in the following Articles:

Comments

Feel free to leave a comment...

Better still write an article, express your opinion & get free backlinks to your site.

In a hurry today, just write a few words in the comment, we'd appreciate! And oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!

You must be logged in to post a comment.

 

Visit ChiTownPost.com - A Wealthy Resource of Articles on All Subjects