Near a magnificent church building on Chicago’s west side, in a neighborhood once the best of the best (in the 1910′s through the 1920′s) and the worst of the worst (1950′s to early 2000′s) is a three-flat apartment building. The basement flooded during the heavy rains in July and the tenant in the garden apartment lost a lot of stuff.
I went there with Curtis. We used an electronic device to locate the sewer line, selected an area, jackhammered a 5-foot hole in the floor, then dug down about 3 feet to expose the 6″ terra cotta (“clay tile”, the same material used on the roof of the church) sewer pipe.
I cut out a section of the pipe and installed three 6″ fittings: a wye to spill into an ejector basin, a check valve and a cleanout tee. In this photo, you’ll see those three fittings on the right and the ejector pump basin on the left.
If you have really incredible abilities with seeing what’s in a photo, you’ll notice a snaky line going through the middle–that’s a live lead water service pipe that we had to be careful not to break. If you’re double extra preternaturally amazing with seeing things in pictures, you might notice a small box at about the 11:30 position in the round frame–that’s an electrical box we placed there to power the pump.
Here’s how the system works: If the city sewer line backs up, the check valve closes. Drainage water that is coming from the building will then spill out through the wye and fall into the ejector basin where a heavy-duty pump will pump it to the other (street) side of the closed check valve. The cleanout tee is there in case the sewer line needs to be rodded, since the check valve (which is a hinged thingy that will let water flow in one direction but not the other) makes it difficult to do drain service from anywhere else.
This system prevents sewer water from a backed up city sewer from coming into this building.
The big storms were a once-in-25-years occurrence.
The system is finished now (I was too busy to take a complete set of pictures). I installed the pump and a discharge line for it, completed the system-basin with more concrete blocks, a precast concrete ring and metal cover, we backfilled and poured concrete to make it back into a floor again.
With a bit of luck, it will never need to do what it was designed to do, kind of like insurance.
