Base­ment Foun­da­tion Cracks Can’t be Ignored in Mor­ton Grove IL 60053

Jun 15, 2014 • By Matthew Stock.

Mor­ton Grove IL is a small sub­urb north of Chica­go that was incor­po­rat­ed in 1895. In its ear­li­est days, Mor­ton Grove was a small set­tle­ment of Eng­lish and Ger­man immi­grants that began arriv­ing in the area in the 1830s. The area didn’t begin to grow until the Mil­wau­kee Rail­road ran a line through it in 1872, estab­lish­ing a stop in the future village.

Fur­ther growth began in the late 19^th Cen­tu­ry when the flo­ral indus­try was estab­lished and many grow­ers built large green­hous­es in Mor­ton Grove. The local indus­try pro­duced prize-win­ning spec­i­mens and the busi­ness­es flour­ished until they were all but destroyed by the Great Depres­sion of the 1930s.

Mor­ton Grove real­ly boomed in terms of res­i­den­tial pop­u­la­tion when the Edens Express­way was com­plet­ed in the 1950s, caus­ing the pop­u­la­tion to jump by an incred­i­ble 15,000. New­com­ers found the vil­lage to be a safe and pleas­ant place to raise a fam­i­ly and still be with­in a short dri­ving dis­tance of jobs in the city.

Today, Mor­ton Grove has more than 22,000 res­i­dents who live in 8,300 homes, more than three-quar­ters of which are at least 40 years old. In homes of this age, it is com­mon for home­own­ers to spot base­ment foun­da­tion cracks and those who do are well-advised not to ignore them.

Base­ment Foun­da­tion Cracks are a Prob­lem for Mor­ton Grove Homeowners

Base­ment foun­da­tion cracks can be non-struc­tur­al or struc­tur­al and they will occur dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent type of foundations.

In a poured con­crete foun­da­tion, a non-struc­tur­al crack that will allow water seep­age is gen­er­al­ly nar­row, less than ¹⁄₈ inch, and is not part of a dis­cernible pat­tern. A struc­tur­al crack that indi­cates foun­da­tion dam­age is typ­i­cal­ly wider than ¹⁄₈ inch and usu­al­ly appears in a pat­tern, with one ver­ti­cal crack in the mid­dle of the wall, angled cracks across the upper cor­ners and, on the out­side, ver­ti­cal cracks along the cor­ner where the dam­aged wall meets the adjoin­ing ones.

In a mason­ry foun­da­tion, any base­ment foun­da­tion crack will occur in a stair-step pat­tern through the mor­tar joints between the con­crete blocks, bricks or stones. When these cracks are struc­tur­al, they will lead to a bowed or bulging area in the mid­dle of the wall.

Repair­ing a non-struc­tur­al crack in poured con­crete is done by the injec­tion method, where an expand­ing polyurethane mate­r­i­al is inject­ed into the crack to seal it all the way through to the out­side soil. The polyurethane remains flex­i­ble after cur­ing to pre­vent re-crack­ing caused by minor foun­da­tion movement.

These cracks can also be repaired on the exte­ri­or by cre­at­ing an under­ground bar­ri­er of sodi­um ben­tonite clay that seals the foun­da­tion against seepage.

For mason­ry walls, seep­age from non-struc­tur­al cracks can be man­aged by installing inte­ri­or drain tile with a small gap between the repaired floor and foun­da­tion wall to allow seep­age to run into the drain tile. The wall can be cov­ered with a vapor bar­ri­er to cov­er the seep­age and help chan­nel it downward.

Seep­ing cracks in mason­ry walls can also be fixed by exca­vat­ing around the foun­da­tion walls and installing an exte­ri­or water­proof­ing mem­brane, a heavy coat of asphalt-mod­i­fied polyurethane that is applied with a trow­el onto the walls on the outside.

Struc­tur­al repairs do not involve the cracks them­selves but rather the foun­da­tion move­ment that caused them. If a foun­da­tion has set­tled or dropped, hydraulic push piers must be installed to raise the foun­da­tion back to lev­el and sta­bi­lize it there. If a foun­da­tion wall has moved or rotat­ed inward due to lat­er­al pres­sure from over-sat­u­rat­ed soil, it must be sta­bi­lized in place by one of two methods:

If the wall has moved less than two inch­es, it can be sta­bi­lized by using indus­tri­al epoxy to attach car­bon fiber strips to the wall to pre­vent fur­ther move­ment, or;

If the wall has moved more than two inch­es, steel chan­nels will be attached to the foun­da­tion foot­ings and tight­ened against the floor joists above to sta­bi­lize the wall.

Regard­less of whether the crack is struc­tur­al or non-struc­tur­al, it can’t be ignored and the Mor­ton Grove home­own­er that spots one or more will need the ser­vices of a base­ment water­proof­ing con­trac­tor or a foun­da­tion repair spe­cial­ist. At U.S Water­proof­ing, our foun­da­tion repair team uses engi­neer­ing data and the lat­est tech­niques to repair and sta­bi­lize foun­da­tions per­ma­nent­ly; our base­ment water­proof­ing experts rely on our 57 years of expe­ri­ence to add dai­ly to our list of more than 300,000 sat­is­fied cus­tomers. Why not ask for our free advice?

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