Basement waterproofing in Glace Bay

Glace Bay presents the same problem peninsula Halifax does, for entirely different reasons: you often cannot get a machine to the outside of the wall.

The town was laid out around the collieries, which means long rows of company housing on narrow lots, houses set close together, and property lines that leave no room for an excavator, a spoil pile and a working trench. That is not a reason to give up on a dry basement. It is a reason to be honest about which system fits. Interior perimeter drainage achieves the same result as exterior excavation by a different route, and on a Glace Bay lot it is frequently the only route.

The foundations themselves are mostly stone and rubble in the pre-1930 stock, with block and poured concrete arriving later. Stone walls do not fail at one crack. They weep through mortar joints along their full length, which is why crack injection is so often the wrong recommendation here and repointing, parging and drainage is the right one. If someone has quoted you injection for a stone wall, ask them to point at the crack.

Ground conditions add to it. The coal measures under Glace Bay run out beneath the ocean, and the abandoned workings across the field affect how groundwater moves and where it surfaces. Combined with flat, low ground toward the shoreline and around the brooks, the result is water tables that sit close to slab level for much of the year rather than spiking after a storm and receding.

The October 2016 rainfall that flooded so much of the CBRM hit here too, and the pattern afterward was consistent: the basements that took water were the ones with no functioning drainage at the footing and nowhere for water under the slab to go. A sealed wall does nothing about pressure under the floor.

Shared and undersized drainage between closely spaced houses is worth checking as well. On several Glace Bay streets, one property’s downspout discharge is the neighbour’s foundation problem, and the cheapest real fix on the whole job is moving water twenty feet.

We work Glace Bay, Dominion, Reserve Mines and the surrounding communities on regular Cape Breton routing.