Sump pump replacement in Springfield.

Nobody tallies basements in the Census, so read the houses instead. About 56 in 100 Springfield homes are detached and 29 in 100 are townhouses, and the typical owner’s home dates from 1968. Many houses of that era here sit over a full basement or a half-buried lower floor, and where groundwater found it, a pit and pump went in, with the house or after some wet spring.

The oldest pits are in North Springfield, Ravensworth and Kings Park, typically built in 1957, 1964 and 1966. A pump swapped several times over sixty years may not empty where you’d guess: a floor drain, the laundry sink, a pipe that vanishes into the slab. County rules allow no sump line, downspout or French drain into the sanitary sewer without a permit, and the wastewater office calls such hookups illegal, since storm water crowding into the sewer can overflow it into creeks, roads and basements. Rerouting it outdoors is priced separately, in writing.

Newington Forest and Newington went up mostly in the 1980s, more than half of each in townhouses; in West Springfield it’s 38 in 100. A townhouse’s lowest level often opens onto a small back yard, so the pump’s pipe ends steps from the foundation and the fence. The county’s soils guide wants roof water carried at least ten feet from the house, with the ground dropping at least six inches every ten feet. Sump water too: dumped at the back wall, much of it soaks down, finds the pit again and gets pumped a second time.

About a third of the homes in Springfield proper are rented and about a quarter sit in condo and apartment buildings. In a condo building, a pit that drains the whole building belongs to the association; one under your own unit usually doesn’t. In a rental, Virginia’s landlord statute puts plumbing the owner supplied on the owner, so tenants should report the pump the first day it hums or short-cycles.