One of the many headaches when dealing with water in your basement is the cleaning and drying of the floor, walls and belongings you have stored there. Cleaning a basement well, requires many hours of hard work to ensure that dampness and wet walls do not become home to mold and mildew. If you are experiencing flooding, or water leakage that would like to fix, call us and we will be happy to offer a solution for your problems. Follow the links below for more information about basement waterproofing.
Ever wonder why it’s a ‘French drain’? It’s got nothing to do with France.
About 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. The human body is more than 60 percent water. A splash of water in a single-malt scotch opens up the taste considerably.
Water is important. And yet don’t you sometimes just hate the stuff?
For much of the East Coast, this spring and summer has been the Season of Rain. Last month, Washington experienced its second wettest June on record. So far this year, we’re running nearly nine inches over our typical total-precipitation level.
It wouldn’t be so bad if all those rain drops flowed in an orderly fashion: down the gutter, into the creeks, rivers and bays, and on to the sea. Unfortunately, many of them misbehave, finding their way into basements and garages. In my neighborhood, many of us dread heavy D.C. thundershowers, because we know they involve sump pumps, wet vacs and dehumidifiers.
Mold, termites pose next challenge for flooded out homeowners
LOOMINGTON – As many Central Illinois homeowners dry out their basements after a week of heavy rains, a local construction manager advises to watch for mold.
You have to pull those carpets back, get that stuff out of there,” McLean County Habitat for Humanity’s Bill Waller said. “See if you can get rid of mold and mildew, you have to treat that. You don’t want that in your house, it can kill you.”
He told WJBC’s Scott Laughlin a shop-vac will dry your carpet, but if you don’t remove that water now, you are also at risk of getting termites.
“When you get termites in your house, there will be mud trails down your foundation either inside or out because that termite has to get back to groundwater everyday,” Waller said.
Waller said water could be getting into your basement through cracks in the foundation you might not even see.
Homeowners need to be alert to mold growt
About a year ago, Jackie Lewis of Girard noticed a bad smell coming from her basement.She took it as a sign there was something wrong. Lewis suspected that mold was causing the bad smell, so at first she tried spraying her basement with bleach. But there was another problem with Lewis’ basement: It never got dry, with almost 2 inches of standing water caused by rain.
This past April, she decided to call waterproofing and foundation repair company Helitech to waterproof her basement.Since then, she hasn’t had problems with either standing water or mold.
“I’m really happy with what they (Helitech) did,” Lewis said. “We’ve had all this rain, but it’s stayed as dry as can be.”
With the constant and heavy rain that has recently hit the Springfield area, those who have never had issues with flooding before may now be faced with standing water in their basements and crawl spaces. This water in turn increases the chances that health-endangering mold will grow in these locations.
