Basement Waterproofing in Lancaster, NY

Village on the creek, town on the plain

The village of Lancaster grew up on Cayuga Creek, one of the three streams the Erie County soil survey identifies as draining the central part of the county into Buffalo harbor. The creek's flood plain, mapped by the survey as alluvial soils, runs through the middle of the village, and the houses nearest it see the water table rise and fall with the creek. Away from the creek the village and the western town are on the lake plain, the Odessa-Schoharie-Rhinebeck and Churchville-Ovid-Lima soils in the survey's terms, both with a perched seasonal high water table in the upper subsoil in winter and spring and slow to very slow permeability.

East of the village the ground begins to change. The survey's Beach Ridge, the old glacial lake shore that runs from Alden southwest to North Collins, passes not far to the east, and beyond it the lake plain gives way to till and the first rise of the plateau. Lancaster is the last flat town before that transition.

Housing: 40 percent pre-war in the village

The ACS 2024 five-year estimate counts about 5,200 housing units in the village of Lancaster, roughly 40 percent of them built before 1940, about 19 percent in the 1950s, 14 percent in the 1960s and 11 percent in the 1970s. The pre-war village houses stand on stone, brick and early block foundations without drains or sumps. The post-war streets are hollow block, and the town's later subdivisions are poured concrete with footing drains of varying survival.

Village basements show the pre-war pattern: seepage through the face of a stone wall, water at the cove joint in March, and downspouts that were once connected to something underground and no longer are. Town basements show the poured-wall pattern: a crack or two that leak, a cove joint that weeps in spring, and a footing drain whose outlet nobody can find. The 1950s and 1960s block houses between the village and Depew fall in the middle: walls that fill and leak at the bottom course, and, on the wettest lots, a horizontal crack a few courses below grade where the clay has started to push.

How Lancaster basements get fixed

Pre-war village houses get an interior perimeter drain with a drainage board over the stone, tied to a sump with a sealed lid and battery backup, and their downspouts traced and rerouted to a legal outlet. Near the creek, sump capacity is sized for a flood-plain water table, sometimes with a second pump on a high float. Poured-wall houses in the town get their cracks injected and their footing drain outlet found and restored where possible, with an interior drain added only where the slab itself is wet.

Lancaster's storm and sanitary sewers are separate; sump discharge goes to the storm system, to daylight or to the yard, and on the flat western lots it needs a freeze-relief fitting and a graded run. Because Cayuga Creek's flood plain is mapped, we also check whether a house is in it before proposing a discharge that a creek rise would simply push back.