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| Author |
Message |
| 13 new of 87 responses total. |
mdw
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response 75 of 87:
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Jul 11 07:12 UTC 2000 |
Whether you're in a flood plain is very much an issue of geography and
topology. If you go outside and look around at the surrounding lay of
the land, you may be able to get an idea. If the land you're on is very
flat, and you are mostly surrounded by hills that go up, and no valleys
that go down, you should be suspicious. You should be even more
suspicious if you see a river or stream or marsh nearby. Another
possibilty is a buried stream - for instance, in Ann Arbor, if you go to
william near 1st, you'll find right at the railroad track there are 4
storm grates below which you can hear gurgling. That's allen creek,
which got roofed over at some point (the 30's?). It's also a flood
plain, and in a sufficiently bad thunderstorm, you can see the water
back up out into the street. This is bad, but it's not the worst design
you can find. The worst design is when you depend on an electric pump
to pump things uphill, either sewage or storm water or both. This is
sometimes found in newer subdivisions. By the same token, it's best to
find a house that doesn't *have* or *need* a sump pump.
In michigan, the local drain county drain commissioner's office might be
a good source of information about storm sewers, any pumps, the lie of
the land, and where the local flood plains are. The local water
authority presumably should know if they have any pumps pumping sewage
uphill anywhere in their service area. Another useful reference may be
a toplogical map of the area in question - you can get such maps for the
local area of michigan (and perhaps all of michigan) from Borders.
As a general rule, if you can walk either downhill, or uphill along a
ridge in all directions from your proposed property, you are probably
not on a flood plain.
The kind of soil also makes a difference. Clay soil is much worse than
sandy soil or gravel, because the water can run along the top instead of
sinking down in and away. Landscaping around the house, & gutters can
also make a difference.
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gelinas
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response 76 of 87:
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Jul 12 03:14 UTC 2000 |
<DRIFT>
Tonight's AANews had a front-page photo of a stalled truck that had tried (?)
to drive throught high water under the railroad trestle on Huron.
I thought *immediately* of Allen Creek.
</DRIFT>
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scg
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response 77 of 87:
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Jul 12 05:38 UTC 2000 |
There was high water under the railroad trestle on Huron? Have there been
any water problems at the Pumpkin? For that matter, is this the mythical
hundred year flood that the building codes for that neighborhood believe in?
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mdw
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response 78 of 87:
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Jul 12 07:04 UTC 2000 |
Well, grex seems to have survived the high water incident, so I guess it
didn't flood the building.
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scott
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response 79 of 87:
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Jul 12 13:24 UTC 2000 |
Apparently we've now had 2 seprate "100 year" rainfall amounts, but I think
a 100 year flood takes a lot more water than that (like a like a sudden melt
of a lot of snow).
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ric
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response 80 of 87:
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Jul 12 14:40 UTC 2000 |
FWIW, the 100 year flood doesn't have a chance of occuring once every hundred
years.
It has a 1 in 100 chance of occuring EVERY year.
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brown
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response 81 of 87:
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Sep 22 19:48 UTC 2000 |
wish i'd have stumbled opon this item earlier
been spending the last nearly 6 months trying to get a house here in chicago
106 years old, structurally sound but superficially a WRECK..
hey it's a 2-flat and it's cheap
about 97 hours till we close...IF we close..
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tpryan
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response 82 of 87:
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Sep 22 21:37 UTC 2000 |
Just consider, October, Friday the 13th, complete with Full Moon.
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mary
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response 83 of 87:
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Sep 22 23:07 UTC 2000 |
Robert, I'd love to hear more about your house and your
efforts to rehab it. Would you consider entering an
item chronicling your project? I've always been in
awe of folks who take on older historic homes which
have been neglected. They rank right up there with
folks who adopt handicapped kids.
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keesan
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response 84 of 87:
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Sep 25 15:40 UTC 2000 |
A friend of ours bought an expensive new house in a flat area with black
locust trees (they grow along rivers) and a sump pump and a basement that is
only a foot above ground level (to make the house look more modern) and as
soon as the power failed for a few days they were down there constantly
bringing up buckets of water to dump outside. Jim rigged up a siphon system
until the power went back on. In most cases you can avoid wet basements by
keeping the gutters cleaned out and berming the earth so it is slightly higher
near the house. Some of the early cinder blocks fell apart (our neighbor has
one where he is patching the blocks all the time from about 1910). Sloping
floors don't mean the rest of the house will have problems, just that you may
have to shave the bottoms of doors so they open, and shim the corners of
appliances so they are level. The joists used were too long or too narrow
to hold up the weight put onto them, and sagged in the middle. Two-hole
outlets can be replaced with three-hole outlets which are cheap (you could
probably even learn to do it yourself) but the knob-and-tube wiring (from the
20s in a friend's house)is more of a problem (it generates low frequency
radiation said to be bad for you). Look in the basement on the ceiling for
the wiring. Galvanized plumbing was still used in the forties and it rusts
out and needs replacing (expensive). Older houses (twenties and thirties and
even forties) have plaster instead of drywall, which blocks much more sound.
They also have no insulation at all, which costs to add (or costs to pay for
the lack of in wasted fuel). Ask about wall insulation and look in the attic
for ceiling insulation. See how hard it is to open the windows, if you plan
to open them. Nineteenth century windows were often held up with pins not
sash cords. Leaky (rattly) windows waste heat.
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n8nxf
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response 85 of 87:
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Sep 26 11:32 UTC 2000 |
If basements are built with "green" cinder blocks, the walls will crack
at the mortar joins as the blocks finish curing; shrinking as they do so.
Replacing a two prong outlet with a three prong outlet is not always that
easy if you do it properly. That third prong needs to be connected to
ground. Houses that were built before the mid 60's may not have a ground
wire going to the electrical box and that means running a wire for that
purpose. Often a difficult task. (Some people say to just connect the
white wire to the ground terminal as well as to the terminal it was originally
connected to. This can pose a significant safety issue. DON'T DO IT!
So far as post and tube wiring, the hazards of low frequency radiation are
not universally accepted. Much research has been done and no harmful effects
have been verified at the levels you might encounter in a home. At least
that I am aware of. This sort of radiation is also present in homes wired
with romex, just a lower levels because the wires are closer together.
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other
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response 86 of 87:
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Sep 28 01:47 UTC 2000 |
If you need to install a ground, just make sure that the ground wire in the
outlet is connected through the entire path of the hot wiring back to the main
fusebox, and then run a wire from the shell of the fusebox, and clamp it
securely to a bare, clean surface on one of the incoming water pipes.
One way of tying the ground in from the outlet back to the fusebox is by using
any conduit as a conductor. If there is no conduit, as suggested above, then
a heavy gauge wire should be run connecting each outlet's ground back to the
main fuse panel and then connecting to a water pipe as above.
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n8nxf
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response 87 of 87:
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Sep 28 17:50 UTC 2000 |
Hopefully the fusebox is already grounded. You shouldn't have to worry about
grounding the fuse box! Once in the fuse box, the copper ground wire gets
attached to the same point as all the while wires. (The white wire is simply
a current carrying ground wire. Ground wires are not allowed to carry current
under normal conditions. If they do, something is wrong!)
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