"Postal68" wrote in message
. ..
I have a French drain with a sump pump in my basement.

For 11 years I NEVER got any water down in my basement, the drain took
care of business.

Now suddenly in the past 2 years I have had 3 major floods (including this
morning) where the water has soaked /ruined my carpets in the basement.

Any ideas why the French drain would suddenly stop working. The Sump Pump
is working fine. It is turning on and off and ejecting the gathered water
from the sump well.

Would blockages/debris that fell into the drain area around the perimeter
of my basement wall be the culprit?

Or could it be a case of the ground outside being so saturated the water
has nowhere else to go but in my walls/French drain and the French drain
can not handle the capacity of water coming in.

Option 3:
I had home construction done (new siding, windows, doors, deck) about 2
years ago. Could they have damaged something? I have looked all around the
areas that they added new doors, windows, deck, ect.. and I can not find
any water seeping in.




By the way, I am in NJ where we were hit with 7-10 inches of rain in the
last 15-20 hours and a state of emergency was declared.



I live in northern NJ, too, and have an outside French drain that normally
carries away water that runs down the back yard towards the house (the yard
was mis-graded sometime in the early 1920s, no way to regrade it now). The
drain forms a "U" around the whole back and sides of the house and empties
down the driveway where the water flows into the street.

This neat little drain system works great in normal rainstorms, but
yesterday sure wasn't normal. We got 7.06 inches of rain in less than 18
hours and it was still raining this morning at 11:30.

Here's what happens to my drain: the gravel-filled trench the perfed pipe is
buried in fills up because the pipe cannot take all the water away fast
enough, even though it's a 6-inch pipe. When this happens, water flows over
the top of the trench and soaks the narrow strip of ground behind the trench
and eventually seeps into the basement.

Yesterday, it got so deep in one spot, an inside corner next to a door, that
the water started flowing under the threshold of the door and pouring into
the basement. Fortunately, it's a short trip to the basement drain, which
was able to handle the flow easily, so not much got damaged. The only other
time that happened was in 1999 during Hurricane Floyd.

So my guess is that yesterday your system could not handle all the water and
overflowed.