Thawing, Flooding, and Basement Anxiety

With most of Michigan and Northern Indiana underwater, you may be wondering what the flooding means for your basement. Or probably not, because if you're one of the hundreds of people that have called this week for help, you know exactly what it means. But there are more dangers than flooding, so let's get all of the anxiety out of the way in one fell blog swoop.

I want to talk about something you might be missing while you’re trying to shop vac the water out of your basement - bowing walls. In addition to the massive rainstorms this week, the temperature has steadily risen over the past few weeks and the ground is now thawed and oversaturated. Add the steady deluge of rain we’ve had, and problems arise.

But let’s back up. All winter, the ground has been (mostly) frozen. There have been a few brief thaws that led to minor flooding throughout the winter, but inevitably everything froze again. This thawing and freezing process led to soil that was oversaturated with water and likely a large amount of frost heave, which is the expansion of soil upon freezing. Frost heave is a major cause of bowing walls.

Once the ground thawed, it was already fully saturated; think of a sponge that’s wet to the point that any additional water just runs off of it - that’s what is happening underground. So when the rain started and kept coming down hard, it started pooling and coming in anywhere it could, like through wall cracks in your foundation.

You’d think that the thawing would cause the ground to contract and lessen the pressure on the walls, but in place of frost heave, we instead get hydrostatic pressure. I know I’m throwing a lot of terms at you, but just think of it as water pressure. Water weighs in a little over 60lbs per cubic foot, so if a surplus of groundwater is looking for somewhere to go, it can turn into a lot of pressure on your foundation walls.

Both frost heave and hydrostatic pressure can lead to bowing walls, which you might not notice until you have a major problem. Unless a fixture (pipes, appliances, etc) is forcibly moved by the wall, bowing often isn’t noticed until there is visible cracking. In a poured concrete wall this will likely manifest as horizontal cracks, but in a block wall, you could also see “stairstep” cracks as the pressure moves along the mortar between blocks.

As inconvenient as flooding is, bowing walls are nothing to ignore. Walls can only lean or bow so far before they fail entirely and collapse, threatening the safety of your home. And without an anchoring system in place, hydrostatic pressure will continue to push inward on the walls.

We have a variety of systems not only for waterproofing your basement, but also to stabilize and straighten your foundation walls. Considering it started raining again as I was writing this, and there’s more in the forecast, the ground is unlikely to dry out anytime soon and the spring is set to be a huge headache for your basement. Call us today and get ahead of the problem so your summer can be worry-free.