Gutters, French drains, raised houses: Flood prep for all budgets

Hedi Garcia was fast asleep in her Smithtown home when her husband screamed up the stairs, "We're getting water."

The living room, bathroom and kitchen took on inches of it, during the recent flooding on Suffolk County's North Shore. It only worsened throughout the night, as Garcia, her husband and their son tried to move their belongings out of each room.

"I felt like I was on the Titanic," said Garcia, 54, who works at Stony Brook Child Care.

Now, the family is living entirely on their second floor, as they continue pick up the pieces from the severe flooding below, she said. There is plenty of damage throughout the first floor, including in the kitchen, which had been redone last year. Now, all of the appliances are gone, as they wait to rebuild.

The house is a part of Garcia's family's history — and now it's time for them to save it.

"My dad bought it in 1973," Garcia said. "I inherited it just two years ago. I just started working on the lawn and the house, and just when we think we’re home free, this happened."

For Long Islanders hoping to ensure their homes are prepared for the next flood, there are several options at varying costs: Vapor barriers, French drain system with sump pumps, or house elevation. But there are also ways to prevent flood damage to your home that you can do by yourself, experts say — and they won't cost a dime.

Protecting the basement

French drain systems and sump pumps may be the go-to solution when considering flood prevention. The two systems go hand-in-hand, said Tyler Baron, owner of Foundation Crack Repair LLC in Sayville. The French drain can be installed around the perimeter of your basement to divert water away from your home, utilizing a sump pump in the process.

"A French drain system always has a sump pump involved," said Baron. "A sump pump itself is just a basin in the ground. If you have just the sump pump, there's a chance that the basin that surrounds it could have holes, so it lets groundwater into it that it pumps out."

"The whole point of that [French drain] pipe is that as water underneath the ground rises, once it gets to the height of the pipe that has holes within it, it's able to drop into the basin where the sump pump is, and actually pump it up and out of the house," Baron said.

To obtain an interior drain system like this, the cost starts at $6,000, said Mark McAlpin, owner of ACM Basement Waterproofing in Islip.

The size of the home, number of professionals working and the scope of the project can all dictate how long it'll take to install. The range can be anywhere from three days to two weeks, McAlpin added.

"If it's a finished basement, people give you pushback because in order to properly fix their problem, sometimes we have to cut out floors, cut out walls and that's where the price tends to go up a little bit," said Nicholas Tasman, owner of Magic Basement Services in Nesconset.

But a French drain system will be more beneficial to those who live at lower elevations on Long Island — for example, some parts of the South Shore, said Baron.

"It's all just relevant to where you are on the Island, whether you're potentially going to have a water issue or not," he added.

Vapor barriers, DIY

A full perimeter vapor barrier can be mechanically installed to the foundation walls as another method of waterproofing, said Tasman. He recommends hiring a professional to do this, rather than trying to achieve something similar by using foundation sealant yourself.

"Concrete does in fact need to breathe," he said. "Otherwise you see moisture start to deteriorate the cement, especially in some older homes."

To install the vapor barrier membranes, a homeowner can expect to spend between $3,000 and $5,000, depending on the size of the space, he added.

As far as DIY, Tasman has some tips on what to do before calling in an expert. First: Start with your gutters.

"Make sure your leaders are depositing the water," he said. "Having the leaders extended as far away from the foundation wall as possible, nine out of 10 times, it solves somebody's problem."

Next: Take a look at your window wells. On older homes, they could be made of wood and starting to deteriorate, Tasman said.

Baron finds this issue in homes all the time, and said it's preventable.

"The basement floods, and it's as simple as $1,000 to divert the drainage system into a pipe, up the ground, 25 feet away, or re-pitch the gutter to the other side of the house."

Raising the house

Garcia said she was quoted $16,000 for a cleanup job on her home. Instead, she and her husband have started to do it on their own: Ripping out the floorboards and removing moldy insulation from their walls.

As for next steps, Garcia hopes to obtain permits from the Town of Smithtown to raise her house.

Jeremy Garrett owns Ironmen Building Movers in Farmingdale. His company elevates buildings, and he said they've been working with several residents and business owners affected by the recent flooding.

"Some of them have four, five feet of water in their house," said Garrett. "So the optimal thing to do is to elevate the building."

The first steps are to contract with an engineer, develop a set of plans and then figure out how to go about lifting the house, and what kind of foundation systems are underneath, he said.

"Most of these projects start at $100,000, and go from there."

Elevating the building, removing the existing foundation and replacing it, is a long-term fix, Garrett said. A basic lift on a house with a crawl space can be completed within four to six months, while a house needing more extensive repairs would be done within a nine- or 10-month range, he said.

There are other "odds and ends" that go into this process, such as the excavation of the foundation and the carpentry that will follow. "Most of these houses have been there for the past hundred years," Garrett said. "They're going to require steel plates, some sort of renovation, almost every one of them is going to require new decks or entryways, and siding."

Jenna Steinberg is still figuring out what's next for her property. The Head of the Harbor resident, who lives along Mill Creek, said her backyard has been severely impacted. The flooding also took out her central air unit, damaged her shed and caused window leakage inside her house.

"When I purchased this home, this was my dream home that I would hopefully be living in for the rest of my life," said Steinberg, 49. "It was serene and peaceful, and now it's stressful trying to think about the timing of getting this bulkhead fixed."

Garrett feels that in extreme flooding cases like Long Island just faced, interior fixes aren't enough.

"It's not getting the building away from the actual problem itself," he said. "And if it's happening now, it's going to happen again."

By Rachel Weiss

rachel.weiss@newsday.com@RachMWeiss

Rachel Weiss joined Newsday in 2016. As a real estate/living multimedia reporter, Rachel writes feature stories and contributes to and appears in on-camera video packages. She was the lead reporter on Newsday’s LI Acts of Kindness series.