Basement Waterproofing in Hamburg, NY

Three kinds of ground between the lake and Route 20A

The Erie County soil survey names a striking topographic feature called the Beach Ridge, running diagonally across the county from Alden on the northeast to North Collins on the southwest, formed as the shore of a glacial lake over years of wave action. Hamburg sits on that line. The survey's Blasdell soils, formed in the reworked gravelly deposits of the ridge, were described from a site in the town of Hamburg west of the village near Ridge Road. Those gravelly ridge soils drain well, and houses on them tend to have dry basements.

On either side of the ridge the story changes. Toward the lake, the survey describes Brockport silty clay loam from a site near Wanakah, with a silty clay subsoil, and the shoreline lowlands are lake clay with a high water table. Inland, toward Boston Hills and Route 20A, the ground rises onto shale till and the plateau, where lateral seepage on slopes is the issue. Eighteen Mile Creek, which the survey says drains most of the southwestern corner of the county and enters the lake about 15 miles southwest of Buffalo, cuts a deep valley through the south of the town.

Village housing and town housing

The village of Hamburg, about 4,300 housing units by the ACS 2024 five-year estimate, is roughly 28 percent pre-1940, with about 22 percent from the 1950s and 13 percent from the 1970s. Its center has stone and brick foundations under nineteenth-century houses and block under the post-war streets. The town outside the village, about 27,400 units, is younger and more spread out: roughly 14 percent pre-1940, 18 percent from the 1950s, 16 percent from the 1970s, and about 26 percent built since 1990 in the subdivisions toward the lake and the hills.

The older village basements leak as old basements do: seepage through stone joints and the wall-floor cove, worst after the melt. The newer town basements are poured concrete with footing drains, and their problems are usually a specific crack, a footing drain outlet that has failed, or, in the lakeshore subdivisions, a water table that the original drain was never designed to handle.

Reading a Hamburg lot

The assessment begins with where the house sits: on the ridge gravel, on the lake clay or on the till slope. Ridge houses with a wet basement almost always have a surface water problem, a downspout or a driveway, and fixing that is the whole job. Lakeshore houses need drainage at the footing and a sump with capacity, because the water table there is a lake-plain water table. Hillside houses need the uphill wall addressed, with a curtain drain or an interior drain on that side, and their cracks injected.

Hamburg has separate storm and sanitary sewers, and sump discharge goes to the storm system, to daylight where a lot has fall, or to the yard. On the lake clay a dry well will not work and we do not propose one; on the ridge gravel it often will.