Serving Gallup
Groundwater & Basement Water Intrusion in Gallup, NM
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
Two inches of rain a month cannot be a flood risk, surely.
The total is misleading because of how it arrives and what the ground does with it. Monsoon cells drop most of that in a few short violent bursts onto mesas and thin soil that absorb almost nothing, so runoff happens at close to the full rainfall rate. The water concentrates in arroyos and arrives at buildings within minutes. Annual totals describe how little rain falls; they say nothing about what happens to it.
The arroyo behind our property is dry. Is it a hazard?
It is a channel, and treating it as one is the correct posture. Rain over its catchment fills it within minutes with flow that moves debris and undercuts banks, and because it looks like a dry gully for most of the year people build, fence, and store near it. Anything downstream of recently burned or newly graded ground is at greater risk still, since those surfaces shed more and carry more with them.
What is the most useful thing to do at the building itself?
Keep the sheet moving past it. On ground that absorbs nothing, water travels across the surface until something interrupts it, and a slab edge a few inches above grade is exactly that. A berm, a shallow diversion, or a raised entry that lets a moving sheet pass by does more than anything applied at the wall. Sealing the slab and wall joint from inside treats the symptom and rarely holds against moving water.
The same questions, in context, on the Gallup mold removal page.