Tanked cellar

[bernardgreen]

Slightly of topic. Part of a cellar that frequently flooded to several feet deep was tanked to be used as a store room. Not long after the occupants were woken in the night by loud creaking sounds and in the morning they found cracks had appeared in plaster on some walls. The dry cellar was being pressed upwards against the floor above as it "floated" in the rising water table. The cellar was flooded ( IIRC by the Fire Brigade ) to rapidly prevent any further damage to the house.

 

[SUNRAY]

Slightly of topic. Part of a cellar that frequently flooded to several feet deep was tanked to be used as a store room. Not long after the occupants were woken in the night by loud creaking sounds and in the morning they found cracks had appeared in plaster on some walls. The dry cellar was being pressed upwards against the floor above as it "floated" in the rising water table. The cellar was flooded ( IIRC by the Fire Brigade ) to rapidly prevent any further damage to the house.

When I were a kid... we had an access road provided along the rear of our gardens and most of our neighbours built garages, most included a pit. Sadly our water table was only about half a metre below ground level and they all flooded. One neighbour had constructed his pit with corrugated roofing sheets and then meticulously lined it with roofing felt stuck on with a black substance which he had to heat up, so I'll call it pitch.
A few days later he returned home from work to find a perfectly formed watertight black box floating on the water, with a lovely row of 8x2 timbers laying across the top of it at bonnet level.

Our pit was a concrete floor and brick wall, our solution was to dig a shallow sump in the concrete and pump the water out whenever we wanted to use it.