Two Chesterfield Townships, depending on how close you are to the bay
Chesterfield has about 45,000 people now, and most of them live in houses that didn’t exist forty years ago. Gratiot is the main road and the shopping, I-94 cuts through the middle, and 23 Mile is lined with newer subdivisions. Then there’s the other Chesterfield, down along Jefferson, where Anchor Bay Gardens, Anchor Bay Harbor and Lottivue sit near the water and the canals. The Salt River runs through the township and empties into Anchor Bay here.
A basement in one part of Chesterfield behaves very differently from a basement in the other, so we’ll take them one at a time.
Along the bay and the canals
Canal homes off the Salt River and Vase Creek are about as close to the lake as you can get and still have a yard. The groundwater under them moves with Anchor Bay. Canal residents here have been on the news sandbagging and running pumps when the lake is up, and the wind direction decides how bad a given day is. Lake St. Clair set record levels in 2019 and again in 2020.
We’ll be blunt. If the bay comes over your seawall, your basement is going to get wet, and no waterproofing contractor can honestly tell you otherwise. What we can do is make sure the groundwater that rises before and after is handled. That means a sump sized for how much it really runs, a backup that works without power, and a discharge that doesn’t dump right back against the foundation.
Inland, on the old farm clay
Away from the water, Chesterfield is flat lake-plain clay that used to be farm fields. Many of those fields had clay tile drains laid under them to make them farmable, and a lot of that tile got cut or crushed when the subs went in. The water still drains toward the old low spots, which sometimes happen to be your backyard.
The houses are mostly 1980s to 2000s poured-wall colonials and ranches. They leak at tie-rod holes, at hairline cracks, and at window wells that have filled with leaves and clay. A lot of that is cleanup and crack injection. A lot of the rest is grading. We’d much rather sell you a regrade and a couple of downspout extensions than a full drain tile system you don’t need.
Window wells deserve a sentence of their own here. Basements from the 1990s on often have deep egress wells, and on flat clay a well without a working drain at the bottom is just a bucket bolted to your foundation. We see a lot of leaks that start at the bottom corner of a window well, and clearing or adding a drain there is a quick fix.
August 2023 and storms that come too fast
In late August 2023, heavy storms flooded parts of Chesterfield badly enough that the township and Macomb County declared a state of emergency, and federal disaster aid later covered Macomb County homeowners for those storms. A lot of that water came up through floor drains and over sump pits that couldn’t keep up. The rain was simply more than the system was built to carry.
That’s the important lesson for an inland Chesterfield house. Your street’s sewer will get overwhelmed in a big enough storm, and when it does, the house-side protection is what counts. A backwater valve keeps sewer water from coming up your floor drain. A backup pump keeps your sump running when the power drops. Neither is exciting. Both are cheaper than a new furnace and a basement full of ruined carpet.
We’re about twenty-five minutes east of our Shelby shop. If you want someone to tell you which of these your house actually needs, we’ll come out and look.
