Homeowners in Washington and Oregon are currently running for safety, shoveling snow and sloshing around, treading water, bailing flooded areas, pumping crawl spaces and basements, hand excavating french drains, and just about every other creative groundwater removal or groundwater mitigation measure they can think of. There are lots of calories being expended by flooded homeowners. Lots of anxiety. Many family considerations and in general, dangerous travel.
People and animals are being stored at neighbors homes in some cases while other folks hunker down for what is projected to be another 3″ of rain in the Portland, Oregon area on top of an historic amount of rain, ice, snow and everything in between that has already hit the ground over the last month.
Some remote areas have reported washed out bridges that lead to homes that are now cut off from the road. Roads and mountain passes are closed. Highways are flooding. Many days of school closures are already in the history books for 2008 and 2009 making this a rough winter for us. All definitions of groundwater removal success are altered in these times. It is unrealistic for any home to actually stay dry under it in these conditions, but most do stay dry. That is because they have been built right and the foundation soil grade compacted and sloped away from the home correctly. These dry homes likely do not have foundation vents below grade on the foundation wall. They do not generally have ingress-egress windows that are uncovered where it rains right in them. These dry homes also have hand excavated french drains and properly installed rain drain discharges.
High anxiety is more apparent now in the eyes of homeowners as they are looking at problems in a tough real estate market with economic uncertainty and in general some fear and loathing to boot. These homeowners are confronted by groundwater problems and know they just do not know enough about the subject to make an informed decision on if, when, what, where and how.
Your crawl space or basement is, after all, just a big hole in the dirt from 18″ deep to around 6 feet of more in some cases that your house sits over. Groundwater finds the air where ever it is below grade. Combine that with bad weather and the combination of poor construction and heavy weather leads to groundwater problems.
The rain and snow accumulation and the total stored water in the snow on the mountains, is reported on KGW News today to be the highest in 25 years.
The homeowners who are still getting significant crawl space or basement flooding amounts of groundwater, and have hand excavated french drains properly installed, and have a compacted grade splash block at the foundation to remove the snow water coming from the snow next to the home, should look to their gutters on the outside of the home which corresponds to the leak on the interior of the crawl space or basement. While this is not conclusive because groundwater that saturates below grade spreads out along the foundation footing in the case of a basement and may actually leak many feet away from where the groundwater source is located, it works most often to point out the area of the groundwater source.
The reason we have gutters on our homes is to prevent the roof water volume, which is the largest amount of water deposited around your home, from running right over the edge of the roof, saturating the foundation area and causing leaking below grade.
When gutters and downspouts are already frozen with ice and you get as much rain as we have in such a short time, the snow and rain will run right off the roof when it melts creating huge groundwater saturation and usually significant flooding below grade. French drains that are not engineered correctly and do not slope enough or do not have hard enough smooth bottoms will hold water in places and freeze the entire system shut. Just because you think you have a french drain does not mean you do from the very evidence of your groundwater problem. This does not occur in hand excavated french drains with a grade of 2 inches per ten lineal feet and exposed river rock that is installed by professionals.
One of my customers told me during the last ice and snow storm a few weeks ago he was on a ladder in the rain chipping the ice out of the gutters on his Lake Oswego home just to get ahead of it when the snow and ice on his roof started melting and the snow started sliding down and falling next to home in a nice fat pile. He took the lesson to heart. It is not by coincidence that this homeowner is also an engineer with a major manufacturing firm. Hillsides that trap snow above the home are very unkind to homes that sit below grade when the rains come or the snow melts. Putting a hand excavated french drain with exposed river rock in between the source of the groundwater and the foundation wall is almost always your best first choice for quantity results in removing volumes of groundwater fast. Nothing can compete with them.
If the home site is an area with a flat grade or a soil grade sloping towards the home, the groundwater problem is certain to become worse with time and rain quantity without the professional installation of hand excavated french drains with exposed river rock. Typically, each year the groundwater problem will get worse until at some point structural damage will become evident. Most often when the home is being sold.
Areas that are already saturated with groundwater and have severe hydrostatic pressure problems will benefit from the installation of hand excavated french drains but not as much as if the french drains were installed prior to the groundwater saturation. The saturation should have been prevented for the most part, if not all together, by the hand excavated french drains, as this stops the addition of more groundwater to the already saturated areas and first slows down, and in time stops the groundwater entry. That is the first goal. You have to slow the groundwater saturation down first by not allowing the same mega amounts of groundwater to soak into the soil around your foundation.
Having home drainage installed during bad weather should be done by professionals who can accomplish the work safely with a cosmetic plan, without leaving the area looking like Craters of the Moon National Monument or where the kids football team practiced after it had rained a few days this spring. Professional installation is required to safely hand excavate through areas that are marked or not marked with utility locate color codes. This is work best left to the professional, even though a savy homeowner may get it done to some degree of satisfaction with study and practice.
The order of hand excavated french drain installation progression and a good engineering plan are equally important, as well as the first feasibility study done by the home drainage professional to ascertain if the home is an appropriate candidate for a hand excavated french drain at all. The limiting factors present at the property may indicate to the professional home drainage contractor that minimal success only can be achieved due to former drainage attempts or other factors present at the home. This type of property may require the contractor to pass on even bidding the job because too many un-fixable problems exist.
There are a few homeowners who have properties that actually are not likely to benefit from the installation of hand excavated french drains. They need to be told why and the contractor simply needs to pass. Some of these homes are located in such a place or way as to prevent the installation of hand excavated french drains. For example: These homes might be up or down hill to the street to the degree that billy goats would get afraid of the slope and nervous on the sloppy wet slopes. Moving 10-20 cubic yards of rock up hill 5 flights of stairs with 10 steps each flight is not something that can be done without a large budget even if the manpower and logistics can be worked out.
Sometimes it is not possible to walk with wheel barrows filled with dirt or rock. The topography may be so difficult logistically that the contractor is forced to bid the job to included extra wages for workers to bucket out dirt to a drop box down stairs if no place on the property can be used, and bring river rock in buckets up stairs. Slow, tough. and expensive. If you really want that kind of high above the street location be prepared to accept the costs and problems that come with that type of property. These hillside properties are frequented by drainage problems many times that can not be solved without extended cost as the hillsides are steep and the homeowners above them are contributing to the groundwater problems around the subject property.
A home drainage professional in your area who knows hand excavated french drains and has the experience to make that call is your best advocate and will counsel you correctly and save you time and money in the long run.
If the installation of a hand excavated french drain is not possible because of any one of many limiting or preventing factors to construction and installation, the contractor probably has another groundwater removal method to suggest instead, or can find a way to stop the source of the groundwater using another method.
It is not possible to describe all these home drainage limiting factors to success. They are numerous and are individual to each home. Most are original construction engineering ignorance errors or the builder just did not want to spend the money to do it right if they did know how. These homes are built to fail and eventually do fail, from a home drainage perspective.
The diligent student of this home drainage study blog will have a good overall view of these limiting installation factors after reading the many articles that make reference to the different types of home drainage limiting factors and the homes to which they apply.
Study up, it can get confusing, expensive and ugly out there in groundwater removal land folks. Arm yourself with home drainage knowledge before calling the multitudes of wanna bee drainage contractors. You will be best prepared to assess the contractors abilities and motivations by starting your interview with a list of questions and a knowledge base with which to discover things along the way. Good job.