The weirdest project I ever worked on was the refurbishment, i.e. remodelling of a sixty-year-old office building that was right next to Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London. It was a beautiful stone-clad seven-storey office building that had a furthur three floors underground. You go three floor underground and you´re talking about a very sinister, dank place. The walls were dripping and for structural reasons, we had to check out what the existing floor was made of, so one afternoon an exploratory hole was drilled and a core sample removed. When we went back the next morning, one complete basement floor was flooded! It turned out that when the building was constructed there were several local breweries in London, which kept the water-table artificially low. As industries re-located out of London in the 1960s to 80s, the water table rose to a much higher level and the basements were not adequately water-proofed.
Part of our job was to put an emergency generator in the basement, but as no-one would guarantee to water-proof such an old construction, this was the solution: put the generator on a plinth and cut a channel all round the base of the plinth. The theory being that if -or when- the water broke through again, it´d drain away harmlessly from around the generator. luckily, that decision was NOT my responsibility!