April brought record-breaking rains and tree-tumbling winds to southeastern Wisconsin, reminding many people of the devastating floods last August.
Long before the latest bout of storms, Wauwatosa homeowner Tony Cuda started puzzling out ways to keep his basement dry. He was determined to protect his home, no matter what it took.
Cuda and his wife have lived in their brick ranch for 35 years. Their quarter-acre lot slopes toward the Menomonee River. 'The river never comes out of the woods. We’re way high," he says. Cuda used to be in the roofing and sheet metal business. He’s a detail guy. When his family moved into the house, he saw evidence of water in the basement. “You could see where water was trickling on the floor,” Cuda says.
So, he installed bigger gutters and extended the downspouts farther away from the house. Problem solved.
But six years later, in June of 1997, Cuda and his wife woke up to 2 inches of rain in the basement. Stormwater had seeped in through the foundation, walls and window wells.
"My plumber called it 'clear water backup.' Basically, the basement is like a clay-lined swimming pool. Water gets in it, and the only way to get it out is to pump it out,” Cuda says.
Still, Cuda considered himself lucky. The water didn’t destroy his furnace or appliances, “but it was a pain, and I don’t like pain,” he says.
So, Cuda had a sump pump installed, "but I thought , what if it dies, so I got a battery backup,” Cuda says.
All was well, until a decade later. Another gargantuan storm struck, overwhelming Cuda’s system. "I talked with another plumber buddy who said you might want to put in a second sump and maybe think about putting in some backyard drainage,” Cuda says.
So Cuda started investigating. He looked at the homes uphill from his. “I finally figured out their drainage water on the way to the river goes right by my house. In fact, my house is a dam,” he says.
But Cuda discovered something else. His home’s original owners recognized the problem and did something about it. “I found a piece of clay pipe in the backyard solid with dirt,” he says. "I was digging and digging on my stomach and hit something. It was a pipe going that way," Cuda says, as he points north. He says he discovered the remnants of a system that piped water — that would otherwise pond in the back yard — sending it around onto the front lawn and away from the basement.
Cuda was amazed. “Somebody 75 years ago saw this problem and put that system — even as low tech as it was, with clay pipes — but the ideas was, 'this is how we’re going to prevent this problem,'” he says.
Cuda followed the original design, simply replacing the clay with PVC pipe, “and it works,” he says. Cuda credits the combination of his back yard and sump systems for protecting his home from flooding.
I visited last August just days after the flood-wielding storm that impacted thousands of homes.
At the Cudas' home, “the back yard at some point — I don’t know when; I was sleeping — was full of water. We had 14 inches,” Cuda says.
But, by the time he woke up, the yard was puddle-free, “The system sucked it up,” he says. And there was barely a trace of water in the basement. “The rug at the bottom of the steps was wet, it was just squishy, you know your toes got wet,” he says.
But Cuda’s neighbors were suffering.
“Right next door here, he had a foot of water. The girl up the street had a foot-and-a-half of sewage in her basement. I felt sick to my stomach just looking at it. My wife and I just looked and said, ‘man, we’re really fortunate,'" he says.
Cuda doesn’t take his system for granted. He replaces his sump pumps’ backup batteries every five years, the pumps every 10. He routinely hires a company that blasts any debris out of his outdoor system.
“The other thing is I’ll come down and test — maybe twice a year — hit the backup pump to make sure it goes. You gotta take care of your stuff,” he says.
Cuda’s words made an impression on this reporter. I have a sump system. I decided I’d better be proactive. A reputable plumber and I took a look. We discovered the pump wasn’t plugged in. When we plugged it in, we discovered the system was dead. I now have a brand new sump system. Yes, it’s plugged in.
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