Serving White Plains
Groundwater & Basement Water Intrusion in White Plains, NY
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
What happens when the buried channel is full?
The surplus comes up wherever it can, which is usually the lowest inlets and basements over the line rather than anywhere near the original banks. That is the difficulty with a culverted watercourse: it has exactly the capacity it was given, less whatever has collected since, and nobody can inspect it. The city's records are worth asking for.
The storm was short and the streets flooded.
With a largely paved catchment, essentially everything that falls becomes runoff within minutes and arrives at the inlets at once. The system was sized for a lesser degree of paving than exists now, and there is nowhere to store the difference in the meantime. That is why intensity matters here far more than the total, and why a brief cell does what an all-day rain does not.
The downtown is all pavement and the neighborhoods above it are not.
Which is why the timing goes wrong. The paved center delivers its rain to the system within minutes while the slopes above take an hour or more, so a long storm sends the two arrivals into the same buried channel one after the other. It is the sequence rather than the total that overwhelms it.
Read it with the local conditions on the White Plains page.