Groundwater & Basement Water Intrusion in Mobile, AL

It changes the nature of the problem rather than its size. Somewhere drier, a building gets spells in which minor damage resolves itself and small faults reveal nothing. Here it rarely does, so what is wet stays wet and a defect that would be trivial elsewhere advances steadily. Maintenance intervals that are perfectly adequate in a drier climate are not adequate here.

At the head of a bay a sustained wind pushes water in and holds it there for as long as it blows, with no surf involved at all. That raises the level in the delta channels and stops them discharging, so rain falling meanwhile has nowhere to go. The two hazards are separate in principle and they arrive together often enough that any plan should assume both.

It drains for a foot or two and then meets clay, and everything stops there. That is why the yard can feel firm while the ground a spade's depth down is saturated, and why a crawl fills when the surface looks entirely normal. A hole dug during a wet spell shows the boundary exactly, and it explains most of what a property does through a wet season.