Keeping water out of Metro Vancouver homes since 2010

The Lower Mainland gets a lot of rain, and it gets it for months at a stretch. That alone would make drainage a common concern, but the local conditions make it harder. Much of the region sits on dense clay soil that absorbs water slowly and drains it even more slowly — so once the ground is saturated, additional rain has nowhere to go but across the surface or against a foundation.

A large share of the housing stock was built before modern perimeter drainage standards. Older Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster homes often still have the original clay-tile or corrugated perimeter drains in the ground, and those systems are decades past their service life. The pipe has silted up, roots have entered through the joints, or sections have collapsed — and the first sign is usually dampness at the base of a foundation wall after a storm.

Topography adds another layer. The North Shore, parts of Burnaby and Coquitlam, and White Rock are hilly, and sloped properties concentrate surface and subsurface water against downhill foundations. Richmond, Delta, and Pitt Meadows are flat and low-lying, where gravity alone is often not enough to move water off a property and a sump pump or engineered discharge is part of the system.

The point is that drainage problems here are rarely one thing. They are a combination of rainfall, soil, slope, housing age, and tree cover — and the right fix depends on which of those is actually driving the problem on your property. That is why we inspect before we recommend. A camera inspection tells us what is happening inside the pipe; a walk of the property tells us what is happening on the surface. From there, the solution is usually clear.