Serving Billings
Groundwater & Basement Water Intrusion in Billings, MT
Basement seepage, failed sumps, and hydrostatic pressure against the foundation are extracted and dried, and the path from the ground is identified so the loss does not repeat. Groundwater and basement seepage are extracted and dried only after the path from the soil is identified — a wall, a slab, a drain, or a failed sump. Drying the interior without stopping that path returns the same water to the same floor.
Frequently asked questions
Water comes off the rimrock and always in the same place.
Cliffs shed at specific points determined by the rock rather than evenly across their face, so the flow below concentrates at those places year after year. That predictability is useful: it means a diversion built at the right spot addresses most of it, and it explains why one property takes water repeatedly while a neighbor never does. Watching during a storm shows exactly where those points are.
Fourteen inches of precipitation. Why is spring the problem?
Because most of it arrives as snow and leaves all at once. A winter of accumulation melts over a couple of weeks onto ground that is still frozen below the surface and cannot absorb any of it, so the water travels near the surface and collects against foundations. The annual figure describes a dry place and says very little about what a foundation experiences in April.
What should we do about plumbing in an unheated shop?
Drain it for the season instead of trying to heat it. Keeping an outbuilding warm through a plains winter is expensive and it fails during the cold snap that would have burst the pipe anyway. A drained line cannot split. Where a building has to stay in service, insulate the runs, provide a reliable heat source, and fit a low-temperature alarm so a heating failure is discovered while it is still a heating failure.
The Billings overview carries this FAQ with the city research.