Bono Consulting Civil Engineers has also helped hundreds of homeowners that are experiencing an unacceptable level of yard flooding. Their lot may be the lowest of the surrounding lots and they collect the water for the neighborhood. Their yard is a muddy mess and the neighbor’s yards are high and dry. What do you do? First thing, if your neighbor is filling in his yard and changing the direction of surface water runoff, call your municipality right away and have them come take a look at it. Once the work has been completed, it is hard to prove that the neighbor changed the grades. After the work is completed and the yard has been landscaped, it is common for the offending parties to deny that they changed the grades and then the burden of addressing the problem and the associated cost is yours. Don’t delay, make the call while they are doing the work.
Assuming you have nice neighbors and they didn’t do anything to change the grades, and you still have ponding in your rear yard, what can you do then?
The answer is dependent on what is allowable in your community and what your construction budget is.
It may be possible to install storm sewer inlets to collect the water and then run storm sewer pipes to tie into a municipal sewer or to a ravine.
Many communities in Northeastern Illinois have minimal capacity in their sewer systems and do not allow new connections to the city sewer system. This is especially true in combined sewer areas including Chicago, Park Ridge, Wilmette, Evanston, Skokie, Lincolnwood, LaGrange and Riverside. In those cases the solutions get more complicated. It may be possible to regrade the yard so that the ponding water can drain to the street or alley by gravity. If this is not feasible then it may be possible to collect the water from the rear yard and pump it out to the front yard. The pump would be outside in a deep structure and the discharge would ideally be in a place that does not cause a problem to your neighbors. Other solutions include designing infiltration systems such as dry wells and french drains and rain gardens.
Floodplain Engineering Chicago | Civil Engineering Residential Chicago
Floodplain Engineering | Civil Engineering Residential