That's what I found in the basement after supper yesterday: an inch of water. Only across the low spot leading to the floor drain, which wasn't draining.
A short, hard storm swept through yesterday evening. When I was out gathering vegetables from the tomato and pepper patch, the air was gravid with rain, a faint mist of droplets materializing and fading away. Thunder was grumbling in the distance, an ominous wagon-wheel rumble. As I cooked and we ate, the rain poured down, overflowing the guttering in waterfalls outside the windows, overwhelming the storm drains in the street and rising to the level of the curbs. The official total is a quarter of an inch, but weather stations in our neighborhood report as much as an inch of rainfall in an hour and a half.
That much rain, that quickly, will overload our combined sewers and trip the check valve in the floor drain. There's usually enough stuff that the valve sticks and any water that gets into the basement will remain.
Or at least it will remain until I take a plunger to the floor drain. I proceeded to do so, and brush the grate clear. My efforts were rewarded with a small whirlpool forming over the drain and most of the water was gone by the time I had put the plunger and brush back in their usual places. I went down before bedtime to find a few lingering damp spots and the dehumidifier going full blast.
I hope the city is making a move to separate storm drains and sanitary sewers.
ReplyDeleteWe have had sewer water back up into our basement twice from storm runoff back-charging the sewer lines. The second time, we had 8 inches of rain in two hours, and of course I was out of town working on radio stations. Damage was minimal only because my wife and daughter courageously spent hours sweeping the overflow from the toilet toward our sump pump, which was struggling because of flooding in the ditch causing back-pressure on the discharge pipe. We only had to bleach the floors, while other neighbors lost furniture, furnaces and other appliances as their basements took a couple feet of poopy water, either because they had no resources to deal with it, or lacked situational awareness, which my family is pretty good at.
After the second flood, we installed a check valve in the entire sewer line. Our battery back-up sump pump discharges onto the driveway rather than the ditch, covering that issue.
An enormous diversion/ retention project has been underway for years and should be complete by 2025. The city can't "uncombine" all the sewers, so the sewer utility is collection storm-driven overflows in a huge tunnel network and processing it afterwards, for eventual discharge.
ReplyDeleteThis probably won't keep the check valve on the basement drain from closing and sticking, but I can help reduce the water ingress by cleaning the gutters more often.
https://www.citizensenergygroup.com/Our-Company/Our-Projects/Dig-Indy
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