Basement Waterproofing in Lackawanna, NY

Low ground at the edge of the lake

The Erie County soil survey gives the county's lowest elevation as 569 feet at the Lake Erie shoreline, and Lackawanna is built along that shore. The survey also documents something particular to this city: mounds of iron ore residue, dumped from the steel mills in Buffalo and Lackawanna, mapped as a miscellaneous area with deposits mostly 3 to 60 feet deep. Much of the rest of the city is mapped as Urban land, where the survey notes that several feet of fill has in places been placed over marshes and flood plains. Smokes Creek crosses the city on its way to the lake.

Under the fill is the lake plain: the Odessa and Niagara clays and silts with their December-to-May water table. A Lackawanna basement can therefore be sitting in original clay, in old fill of uncertain makeup, or in both, and the water behaves differently in each. Fill drains unpredictably; clay does not drain at all.

Steel-town housing and its foundations

The ACS 2024 five-year estimate counts about 9,300 housing units in Lackawanna. Roughly 31 percent were built before 1940, about 12 percent in the 1940s, 21 percent in the 1950s and 16 percent in the 1960s. The pre-war streets of the First Ward and the neighborhoods near Ridge Road carry the stone and brick foundations of the mill era; the post-war blocks toward the east are hollow concrete block. Both were built without footing drains or sump pits.

Stone foundations here weep through the joints across their whole face, often worst on the wall facing the lake wind and the wall with the downspout. Block walls fill and leak at the bottom course. And in the older sections, downspouts that were tied into the sewer generations ago have frequently failed underground, so roof water discharges into the backfill without anyone knowing.

What a Lackawanna basement needs

The assessment in Lackawanna pays extra attention to the outside: downspout lines are traced, because a broken one is a common cause; grade is checked against fill that may have settled toward the house; and the floor drain is tested, because backups and groundwater are both possible here. Inside, stone walls get a drainage board lapped into an interior perimeter drain, block walls get weep holes, and the drain runs to a sump with a sealed lid and a battery backup.

Where the ground is fill, we probe it before committing to a sump location, since fill can hold pockets of water or none at all. Sump discharge is routed according to the city's sewer rules, to the yard or the storm system where it exists, and always graded to drain so a January freeze does not stop the pump. On the narrow First Ward lots, where the outside of a wall may be a shared driveway, the whole system is built from inside, and the downspout on that side is carried to the front or rear of the house rather than left to discharge between the buildings.