Quote:
Originally Posted by jp498
At our office, there was a small stream flowing through the basement. The water main out front (probably 6") was leaking according to the water analysis. The water company dug things up, flooded our street and they had to shut off our street. A rock had worked its way up (over many years) and punctured the pipe underneath. This was probably a 6-8" fieldstone.
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Off topic, but related to streams running through basements...
A couple years after our house was built, in the spring, when mud season was just starting, all of a sudden water started running into my basement through the conduit that the power lines come into my breaker box. Water was running into the back of the breaker box, and running out of the box onto the floor. I thought that perhaps the conduit, had been punctured, and was leaking. The conduit goes through the concrete wall, outside, and under my driveway to meter on the other side of the driveway. Well, I called up the contractor and electrician who connected the power to the house, and got this "ahh.... I think I may know what's wrong, but you'll have to wait a month until we can get an excavator in there".
Well I rigged up a plastic cooler with a hose connection, and put it under the breaker box, and ran the hose out through a hole I drilled through the wall on the other side of the house. Eventually the snow-melt stopped, and the stream dried up, and they brought the excavator in (this was before I bought my back-hoe), and they knew exactly where to dig. Turns out that apparently when they installed the conduit, they ran out of conduit, so they ran it about 80% of the way to the power pole, then ran conduit from the power pole, to meet it, but came up about 1 section short, so there was about 4' of the power line coming out of the conduit into bare ground, then back into the conduit. Since this was under my driveway, that freezes very deep in the winter, it was frozen underneath the conduit, and when the thaw started, my driveway was a lake and was thawing from above, and the water just poured into the conduit leading to my house. (Off the driveway, where there is snow cover, thawing generally occurs from the bottom up.)
Anyway, I was kind of annoyed that they would do such a thing, but I was happy that they fixed it for no charge. But it makes me wonder what other shortcuts they took when building my house.
But I'm glad that they didn't come out right away to fix it, because the stream into my basement was relatively slow, kind of like a faucet that is flowing a bit more than a drip, just enough to be a steady stream, and that low flow was because the water had to seep through the ground around the conduit. But if they had dug it up right away, the hole would have filled 3' deep with water, and it would have been POURING into my circuit panel box under pressure, which wouldn't have been good. But it sure had me a bit nervous with water running through the power box for over a month.