In September 2020 the Town Engineer wrote to Vienna’s builders about seasonal high water tables. The letter lists what the Town had been seeing: groundwater flooding basements, sump pump water on sidewalks and streets, slick in warm weather and icy in winter, and more complaints about pumps that never stop and pumps that quit when the power goes. The Town sits in a minimal flood hazard area, so the water in most Vienna pits comes up from the ground, not over a creek bank.
Since November 1, 2020, new houses in the town get their lowest floor set against the seasonal high water table on that lot, under Fairfax County’s policy. About a quarter of the town’s homes went up after 2000, and those built before the rule weren’t held to it. Where one of those basements sits low, the pump can cycle for days after a wet spell and wear out long before one in a drier basement.
The older two thirds, built before 1980, are a different case. A 1950s or 1960s basement may have gotten its pit years after it was poured, its discharge sent wherever was handiest, often the curb. Water dumped there is the icy sidewalk the Town hears about. Its infrastructure manual has buried downspout pipes surface ten feet inside the property line, and a sump line does best ended the same way, on your own grass.
On the county side, Wolf Trap is nearly all single-family houses, a third of them from the 1980s and 90s, so its pits have likely seen a few pumps. Fairfax County’s sewer diagram shows a sump pump discharging outdoors as proper and one piped into the sewer lateral as improper. If we find one tied in, moving it outside is the discharge work named beside the price.