So, St. Louis just got an unbelievable amount of rain, which resulted in our basement stairwell filling with water, blowing out our basement door, and flooding our basement with almost four feet of water. We’ve called Roto-Rooter, who say they’re sending someone, and we’re trying to get a hold of the Sewer District to see if they can help us. Given the season, there’s a decent chance that there will be more torrential rain, which would be an epic disaster.
A friend who lived in Ferguson had an issue with storm water coming into her basement through the floor drain. It was solved by getting a rubber plug that fit the drain. The plug had a 1 1/2" threaded hole in the center into which was placed a piece of PVC pipe about 4’ long. When the drain backed up with storm water, the water rose into the pipe rather than into the basement. Allowing the water to enter the PVC pipe relieved the pressure that would have popped a solid plug out of the drain. As long as the pipe was higher than the level the water as trying to reach, the basement never flooded again.
Might not work in your case, but could be tried for not too much money.
Of course if the water pours down the steps, it would have no way to drain from the stairwell with the plug and pipe in place. So maybe this wouldn’t work for you.
We’re doing OK. We bought a pump, and we’re going to try to pump out the remaining water. Everything in the (finished) basement is more or less a total loss (including most of our books), but it’s just stuff. We’re all OK.
What worries me is that it might happen again. Obviously our door is broken, and if this is a sewer issue, the next big rain storm will just cause a repeat.
The insurance adjuster is supposed to call in the next couple of days.
When you say sewer, do you mean sanitary sewer or storm drain?
From your description, this sounds like runoff from the rain flooding your outside basement stairwell and breaking through the door. Is that correct? One thing to do would be to install a water tight door. How deep was the water on the door?
Really old parts of St. Louis City have shared sanitary & storm sewers. A major downpour can drain all the streets into the shit plumbing which, due to excess volume, then backs up into the houses’ basements through the sanitary floor drains.
Much of old STL is also hilly, and in some lower-lying blocks it’s not uncommon to flood almost every basement in the area.
I’m in the county. MSD installed a new larger sewer line in the street behind us a couple of months ago, which runs into the old, smaller line pretty much under my house. We think that caused everything to come up into our yard, which then spilled into the rear stairwell. There was probably seven or eight feet of water built up back there, which was way too much weight for the door to take. I was attempting to hold it closed when it slammed open with enough force to toss me back about five feet (dislodging my wedding ring, which is now lost).
The high water mark was 34 inches. We’re down to about 4, and hopefully will be mostly drained in an hour or so. We’ll try to clear and salvage tomorrow, maybe rent a power cleaner to blast everything clean and start from scratch. We’ll see if insurance covers anything, but even if it doesn’t (and MSD doesn’t give us anything) we can claim catastrophic loss on next year’s taxes. In the meantime, the biggest question is how to keep it from happening again. Obviously, we’ll try to get a new, watertight door, but I’m not sure that anything would have withstood that pressure. We need to keep the water out of the stairwell.
In your case my suggestion would not help at all. :smack:
Sorry for your problems. I lived in the Florissant area for 35 years and am quite familiar with MSD. :rolleyes:
Perhaps a raised curbing around the stairwell and a Bulkhead Door might be a solution. The curbing would have to be higher than the water level anticipated in the yard of course.
Take pictures. Get your tetanus shots up to date. Try a temporary barrier over the stairwell to prevent anymore rain coming in. Build temporary dike in front of the stairwell to slow or stop the stairwell from filling up again from standing water.
LSLguy: Ah yes, I’d forgotten about the combined sewer.
These are good suggestions, particularly about having a berm (or curb as GaryM suggests) around the edge of the stairwell. That might keep water out. I agree with you fachverwirrt, it sounds like the water was so deep that a watertight door wouldn’t work.
Is there a sewer manhole in your yard?
Here’s some free online publications which may or may not be helpful:
I can tell you something not to do. Don’t try to vacuum the water out of the basement with a wet/dry shop vac and then pour the water from the shop vac down a drain in your house. If the sewer is blocked, the water will just come back up through the drain. I know this from experience.
If you do vacuum up the water, you’ll have to haul it outside and dump it there.
Just a thought, could you build some kind of sump pump arrangement near the door and just let it be pumped out of the house somewhere where it will runoff away from the door in question? Kinda like better to leat it leak in a controlled fashion rather than risk another catastrophic failure.
I worked at an amusement park where we did this on our miniature golf courses. There were sump pumps in the pump houses for all the fountains and the pump pit for the waterslides. If rainwater filled golf course ponds or waterslides past a certain level they all pumped to a large pond in the picnic area, we also had the ability to pump to the street gutters in an emergency (like the pond overflowing)
Thanks, kunilou. We are indeed hiring somebody to take care of the dirty work. It’ll be expensive if insurance doesn’t cover it, but I think it’s worth it to do it right.
We’ve taken pictures. The guy we’re hiring to do clean-up/demo took pictures. They’re going to remove everything from the basement and leave it for us to inventory before trashing it.
I am going to build a berm around the stairwell using some bags of marble chips left over from some yard work and 4mil plastic. But I need to wait until the demo is done.
We both got tetanus boosters today. I particularly needed one, since I was pretty beat up (scrapes, bruises and cuts) from the initial surge, and spent seven hours in that crap.
I don’t think a shop vac would have helped in this situation.
At any rate, we’re having someone else do the clean up.
We bought ourselves a submersible pump to help drain things. It has an automatic on/off switch (it’s only on when underwater). I think we’re going to stick it in the stairwell for now.
