Foundation cracks and water

So another common question I get is about settlement. And most people see that they call the engineer because they see the cracks. Maybe they've noticed that the crack is going all the way across the wall. But when an engineer comes out there, they often... We're trained to see what's causing that crack, right? We see the drainage around your basement slab. We see the down spout. We see how the slope of the grade of your land is. And then we also see patterns, right? So whether or not the crack is wider at the top or at the bottom. So uniform settlement is harmless. In fact, it's even expected the first couple of years. But the whole building, it goes down together. And what we need to do is fix the water first. So measure that crack, control that water, slope it away from your house. So one of the cases that I worked on was a church that called because they had some cracking in their drywall. They were gonna replace the drywall. But they were cautious enough that they called an engineer just to make sure that it wasn't structural before they covered up the problem, essentially. The cracking had some pattern. And along the north wall, you can even see that the molding had cracked too. Well, that's a pretty good sign that you have some strong forces there. So they have some settlement just in that corner. So we looked around the house. We saw that they had just put in a new hydrant. Maybe just 20 feet or so from the church. And the ground was pretty soft there. So it hadn't been... it had probably been put in, you know, pro bono, maybe with some friends of the church. But it wasn't properly compacted. And because of that uncompacted soil, the rock foundation underneath the exterior walls of the church were starting to slide out. Because the erosion from the new water hydrant. The fix for this particular case was to, you know, dig away from that north wall, repoint those rocks, or you might have heard of repointing with respect to brick repair and rehabilitation. It's really just putting in a structural strength epoxy between the rocks and straightening them up. And then we're going to backfill it. And then also put some soil anchors in every 10 feet to keep this from happening again. Because the church was on a little bit of a slope. So it was a good thing that they called when the drywall was signaling to them and telling them, hey, something was going on. That they didn't just drywall over what they thought was just, 20 year old walls that maybe needed replacing.