Sump pump – Friend or Foe?

After the June 2008 flood, we need to answer this question. Your sump pump can be your basement’s best friend or it can be the City’s sanitary sewer system’s foe, or it could be both. If your sump pump is large enough, operating properly during heavy rains, and discharges to your yard or to the storm sewer system, then it is helping to reduce basement backups and is everyone’s friend.

However, if your sump pump can’t keep up with the flow of water into your sump crock during heavy rains, or if the sump pump is illegally routed to your laundry tub or to the sanitary sewer system, then it is everyone’s foe. These undersized sump pumps allow excess water to run across the floor to the floor drain and into the sanitary sewer contributing to basement backups of raw sewage into homes. Illegally connected sump pumps do the same thing.

The City has spent tens of millions of dollars upgrading its sanitary sewer system. Yet all these improvements are meaningless if undersized or illegally connected sump pumps discharge water into the sanitary sewer system.

If your sump pump did not keep up with the rains and high groundwater this summer, replace it with a larger one and consider a battery backup model as well. The vast majority of problems reported to the City with water in the basement (or sewer backup) was caused by or related to power outages during the June 7 th storm. This will help keep your basement dry, your house safer (i.e. less chance for growing mold and slipping on wet floors), and keep sewers from backing up.

In addition, check your sump pump discharge. It should be routed outside to an above ground drain pipe (fairly easy to check) or to a storm sewer (more difficult to check). If it does not discharge to a drain pipe outside, where does it go? Does it discharge underground? Where to? If you can not figure these out, contact the Engineering Division at 787-3919 and we can either answer your questions or provide assistance to you in determining where your discharge ends up.

By checking your sump pump, you can reduce the potential for a wet basement in the future and help keep your neighbor’s dry as well. And before thinking it is winter and now is not a good time to check into this, it is better to check now then when the flood hits and it is too late.