MacLennan has helped this historic commercial property had flooded due to an extremely high water level in the river directly next to the building. The walls and footings of the property formed the side of the river, because of this the water got to the bottom of the windows but entered through the wall floor junction and defects in the concrete slab.

MacLennan surveyors attended during the flooding and installed emergency automatic pumps to keep the water down, the basement area had flooded in previous years and had been tanked with a cement based tanking system. MacLennan deemed the installation to be defective and the system not suitable due to the friable historic brickwork laid in lime mortar.

MacLennan replaced the existing defective and poor quality concrete slab with a new engineer designed slab attached to the walls to prevent flotation and installed suitable backup systems which would keep water pumping during power cuts.

The company detailed the joints and the base of the wall to further reduce ingress and managed any water that came in with a pumping system in a cavity drain membrane system. MacLennan carried out surveys and calculated the flow rate of water into the property and the required flow rate out to give a 100% failsafe.

The pumps were designed around the amount of water that had flooded into the property over a given time. Once the litres per minute had been calculated, MacLennan’s designed a pumping system which could pump the water out. The specification included enough pumping power so that the pumps would only be required to work half as hard as they could. Further to this full redundancy was built in, meaning if half the pumps failed the system could still cope.

The property is now completely protected against water ingress and at no risk of further damage from flooding. The installed system is capable of pumping out a vast amount of water during the event of further rising water levels, to almost double the possible predicted needed capacity. The flood proofing was successful and left the residents of the building sheltered from any further distress.