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Old 05-21-2021, 02:27 AM   #19 (permalink)
Guybrush
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Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Scabb Island
Posts: 6,525
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Oh no, your house in a basin! That's rough. We see variations on that theme here too, although your situation sounds pretty bad.

The street our previous house was in was a slope because this is a hilly country. If you looked down the street, there was a dead end at the end of it and then straight into the front porch of a house that itself was at least a meter or two lower than street level. Of course, whenever there was significant rain, a small river would flow down the street, right into that house. Yay for them! They tried putting like a tarmac ledge there, but it couldn't really have helped that much.

We also have a lot of areas that get flooded now and then and will likely become more so in the future with climate change. The weirdest thing, to me, is that some of the houses built in these areas have basements. So every time there's the inkling of a flood, there's water coming into those basements, both surface water and sewage coming up the pipes as surface water gets into the sewer and steals away all the capacity.

In my opinion, the best thing is to do a better job at regulating this at the (local) government level, like prohibiting people to build in certain areas or in certain ways (like building a basement). Expertise or even just competence on surface water is really lacking, at least here and in many layers of society.

The two houses we've bought so far, I did think about this so both our houses have been raised / above street level and well above public sewage lines so that there's little risk of it ever backing up all the way to our basement. At least unless we jam up our private pipes with something (but as the mantra goes, toilets are only for pee, poo, TP and maybe puke if you're sick).
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