I hired a friend a few years ago to fix the problem. The garage flooded, just a little, every time it rained because the house was built with a downhill driveway leading to a basement garage with retaining walls on both sides.
That both sides, that's the problem. You can do this if you're building on a hillside, leaving a slope away from the garage on one or the other side. But water always obeys the law of gravity.
Always. I've checked this out, and it's true.
Ever hear of something that's a game of inches? Well, when you're aiming to have the slab in front of the garage be a few inches lower than the garage floor, and it ends up a few inches higher, you've lost the game. And when your friend can't afford to redo it out of his pocket and you can't afford to pay to have it done twice, well, you've probably lost the friendship.
I actually didn't quite lose the friendship. But it was badly sprained.
And now my garage is my rain gauge. This is my rain gauge reading 3.1 inches.
Of course, if I didn't have the example of an entire town getting wiped off the map by a tornado to make me feel like bitching about a flooded garage is petty, my next door neighbor's rain gauge showed even higher. After my floor drain had caught up with the deluge, he still had a pretty deep pool in the driveway. Thing is with this row of houses, we all have the same problem: floor drains get clogged, pumps fail, power goes out when it's raining, and sooner or later you get this.
Been there. I feel his pain, because I know that the finished part of his basement is flooded at this point. That's how mine was a couple years ago.
Speaking of a couple years ago, I was in Greensburg a couple years back, and went down to the bottom of the world's largest hand-dug well. It was amazing, absolutely huge. 109 feet to the bottom and 39 feet in diameter, with hand cut stone masonry walls. If people could dig that well, maybe they have the stuff to rebuild after an F5.
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