Basement Waterproofing in West Seneca, NY

Two creeks and a flat plain

The Erie County soil survey singles out the Cayuga, Buffalo and Cazenovia Creeks as the streams that drain the central part of the county and enter Buffalo harbor just south of the city. Two of them run through West Seneca, and their flood plains, mapped by the survey as Wayland and Teel soils of alluvial origin, carry water tables that rise with the creek. Between and beyond the creek corridors the town is on the Odessa-Schoharie-Rhinebeck and Niagara-Canandaigua-Cosad lake-plain soils, with their December-to-May high water tables, grading toward the glacial till soils along the town's higher southern and eastern edges.

That mix gives West Seneca two different basement problems. Close to the creeks, the water table can come up fast during a melt or a heavy rain and sumps run hard for days. On the flats away from the creeks, the problem is the slow, steady saturation of clay backfill that keeps a block wall wet for half the year.

A post-war town with post-war walls

By the ACS 2024 five-year estimate West Seneca has about 21,200 housing units, only about 12 percent of them from before 1940. About 18 percent date to the 1950s, 20 percent to the 1960s, 16 percent to the 1970s and 10 percent to the 1980s, with modest building since. The dominant foundation is hollow concrete block, with poured concrete taking over in the later subdivisions. Many of the 1950s and 1960s houses were built with clay tile footing drains that have now had sixty years to fill with silt.

Block walls on wet clay do two things: they fill with water and leak at the bottom course, and, under enough pressure, they crack horizontally a few courses below grade and begin to bow. West Seneca has both, and the second is more common on lots where a driveway or patio was added later and now sends surface water against the wall. The 1980s and later poured walls in the eastern subdivisions have the poured-wall pattern instead: a shrinkage crack near a window that leaks every spring, and a cove joint that weeps when the footing drain's outlet has been lost.

The West Seneca approach

For the flats, an interior perimeter drain with weep holes into the block cores and a sump with a sealed lid and battery backup is the durable fix; where the wall has begun to bow, straps or anchors go in first. Near the creeks the same system is built with extra sump capacity, sometimes a second pump on a high float, because the inflow during a Cazenovia Creek rise is not a trickle.

The town has separate storm and sanitary sewers, and sump water goes to the storm side or the yard. Grade matters here more than on the flattest lake-plain towns because much of West Seneca has a little fall to work with; we use it to get downspout and sump water moving away from the house on the surface wherever the lot allows.