BLUE SPRINGS

Blue Springs did most of its growing between the seventies and the nineties, which puts the typical house we look at here at thirty to fifty years old with a full basement under it. That is old enough that the backfill around the walls has settled and stopped protecting them, and young enough that nobody expects a problem yet.

The clay east of the city drains slowly. Water that cannot get away sits against the outside of a basement wall, and every freeze through the winter pushes on it a little harder.

There are more than 75 Blue Springs foundation and waterproofing jobs in our records, and older work that predates them. Most of what we have learned here is about fill and grading rather than clay, which is exactly what the soil survey would predict.

What the ground under Blue Springs is actually doing

Blue Springs is built mostly on Sharpsburg, with Sibley and Menfro filling in much of the rest. Extensibility across those three runs 3.2 to 4.8 — moderate at the top end, low at the bottom. About a third clay.

Soil that moves this modestly rarely lifts a foundation on its own. What it will do is settle unevenly where a builder brought in fill to level a lot, and Blue Springs did a great deal of building on rolling ground. The movement we find here is usually about what was done to the site, not what the site was made of.