What does a Champaign water call usually involve?
Champaign is the anchor for the whole line, so its distances are zero; the nearest towns in the plan are Savoy, Urbana and Bondville.
A call from Champaign tends to start with a question about the source. A basement that has taken in surface water after a storm is a different job from a kitchen floor wet from a dishwasher. The crew asks which room is affected, whether the water is clear or dirty and whether the drain has been running slowly. Those answers set the first step before anyone is on the way.
Once the crew arrives, it reads the building from the lowest point up. The basement, the crawl space or the slab is checked first, because water settles there, and then the walls, the floors above and any room that shares a drain with the wet area. The readings are logged at the first visit so the drying has a measured goal.
How do the southeast ponds and the river affect a Champaign building?
The detention ponds near Windsor Road and U.S. Route 45 are built to hold storm water and release it slowly. When a storm delivers more than they can hold, the surplus has to go somewhere, and a lot downslope from a pond edge can take it. The crew traces the route across the lot to see whether the water came over the bank, along a drainage path or up through a drain.
The upper Embarras River runs through the same part of the city. The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the upper Embarras basin had main flooding in Illinois in December 2015, which is the regional record this page cites. It is a basin-level report and does not describe a particular street, so a Champaign address is checked on its own readings.
What is different about campus-side Champaign?
The campus lies between Champaign and Urbana, and the southern part of it sits on the upper Embarras. Buildings on the campus side of the city include university property, houses, rental houses, apartments and commercial premises, so the owner and the occupants can be different people. The crew identifies them at the start, because the access and the records depend on it.
Shared drains and shared walls are the thing to watch in those buildings. Water from one unit can reach the unit below, and a backup in one drain can show in another. The readings are taken in every unit that the water could reach, not only the one where the call came from.
Who answers repair-permit questions in Champaign?
The City of Champaign's building department answers questions about repair permits for buildings inside the city. A repair to a wall, a floor, a foundation or a plumbing system can need a permit, and the rules depend on the work. The crew does not decide permits, but it can tell you which work it expects to be repaired, so the question can be put to the department with the drying log attached.
Keep the readings and the photographs with any permit application. They show the building was dried before the repair started, which is the sequence most offices expect to see.
