INDEPENDENCE

Independence is one of the oldest places in the metro and the housing shows it. Streets laid out long before the war sit a few blocks from neighbourhoods that filled in through the fifties and sixties, and those two kinds of house fail in completely different ways.

A stone or block foundation from the twenties loses its mortar joints first and water follows them in. A poured basement wall from 1958 is more likely to bow.

The ground here drains toward the Blue River and the creeks feeding it, and the lots nearest those drainages are the ones still wet a week after a storm.

Independence is the city we have worked in most — over 200 jobs in our current records alone, and the company was here well before those records began. That history is why we are comfortable telling an Independence homeowner that their crack is probably a water problem rather than a soil one, when it is.

What the ground under Independence is actually doing

Independence has some of the calmest ground we work on. Knox and Sibley together cover about 40% of the city, and both are wind-deposited loess soils with linear extensibility near 3.2 — low. They hold together and they do not swell much.

That changes the usual diagnosis. When an Independence foundation moves, the cause is more often water going where it should not — a failed downspout, a grade sloping back toward the house, an old sewer lateral — than the soil itself expanding. It is worth knowing before anyone sells you piers, because a drainage problem does not need them.