Sump Pump-ageddon

Woe be the world when the sump pumps turn against us. And this, dear readers, I fear has finally come to pass. It was only a matter of time--or, more to the point, an extended period of freezing weather--before the needs of the indoor underworld (people's basements) would begin to wreak havoc on the great suburban out of doors better known as sidewalks and driveways.

It is, once again, that mischievous substance known as water--the only molecule at liberty on this earth to pass with ease from one state to another, from gas to liquid to solid and back again--that is playing tricks.

Rising out of the basement as a liquid, this sump pumpage acts much like a fresh spring, a rivulet, warm enough to begin flowing across the pavement towards Harry's Brook. In above freezing weather, this drainage is benign, flowing away from the house and down into the street, where gravity leads it to a storm drain that connects to the local brook.

But in freezing weather, the water solidifies into a glacier where before there was a driveway.

On Linden Lane, this thick crusting of road salt, along with the traffic cones that were just removed today, may well have been applied to reduce the hazard created by a sump pump that empties into the street and has proved hazardous during cold spells in previous years.



Sump pumps can also cause problems if they drain into the sanitary sewer (the one that carries water from sinks and toilets to the treatment plant), adding unnecessarily to the town's wastewater treatment costs. Some of Princeton's homes still have this faulty connection.

Far better than releasing sump pump water onto a driveway, out into the street, or into a sanitary sewer, is this backyard discharge,

which allows the basement water to flow out into the yard where it can seep into the ground and, during summer dry spells, quench the thirst of gardens, lawns and trees. It helps, of course, to have some slope to carry the water away from the house, which many yards do not.

As it happens, these two houses are built where once there was an actual tributary of Harry's Brook. Though the creek was filled in to build the homes, it still travels underground, seeping into their basements and necessitating a lot of work by their sump pumps. This is a domestic version of what happened with the Spring Street parking garage downtown, and speaks to the perils of trying to ignore or erase the original hydrology.

What water doesn't get absorbed by the uphill neighbors' backyards flows towards my yard beyond the fence, where I've actually recreated a streambed to imitate the original tributary. Conveniently, this frozen stream reveals what is hard to photograph at other times of the year, when the water flow blends into the grass.

Somewhere in Princeton, I'm sure there's some clever homeowner who has channeled sump pump water to make an ice skating rink in the backyard.

These are some ways to tame a sump pump's offerings, to give the mischievous water room to play, and to turn Sump Pump-ageddon into Sump Pump-a-Garden.