Storm & Flood Damage Recovery in Boston, MA

Direction and duration. Rain driven sideways at sustained speed gets behind siding laps, around window seals, and through masonry joints that shed falling rain without trouble, and it keeps doing it for many hours. The assembly is not defective; it is being tested on an axis it was never designed for. Extract the wet wall cavity; then flash and seal the windward details before the next coastal storm repeats the same horizontal drive.

It is turning a shedding roof into a holding one. Heat escaping the top-floor rooms melts snow higher up; the melt refreezes at the cold eave, and the ridge of ice holds standing water behind it. Shingles shed water running down; they do not sit in a pond, so the water works under and into the ceiling below. Extract the wet ceiling and map the deck; attic air sealing is what stops the next dam.

It can be. Nineteenth-century masonry cellars here were cut close to a coastal water table, so a storm surge or a high tide lifts that table against walls that were never damp-proofed. A sunny high tide and a wet cellar is the signature that the water is the table, not a rain leader. Extraction still comes first; a sump and perimeter drainage manage the table the tide is setting.