Parking Lot Drainage & Standing Water in Rochester, NY

If the same corner of your lot holds water after every rain, tenants complain, customers walk through it, and in a Rochester January it becomes an ice hazard with your name attached to it.

Ponding is almost never a mystery. In our experience the cause is one of four things — and three of them are inexpensive.

Why commercial lots pond

• The catch basin sump is full. By far the most common cause, and the cheapest to correct.
• The grate is blocked. Leaves, litter, or a frame that has settled and now sits proud of the pavement so water runs past it.
• The outlet line is packed. Water enters the basin but has nowhere to go from there.
• The pavement has settled. A genuine grading problem — the only one of the four that needs a paving contractor.

We start with the first three, because together they explain most ponding and cost a fraction of pavement work. If it turns out to be grading, we'll tell you that too. We don't do paving, so there's nothing in it for us either way.

The winter liability problem

Standing water is a slip-and-fall exposure the moment temperatures drop, and Rochester spends a lot of the year below freezing. A lot that drains properly doesn't ice over in the same three places every January.

Worth noting for anyone managing risk: ice that forms repeatedly in the same location from a known drainage defect is a materially different conversation, after an incident, than ice from a passing storm. Clearing drainage before the first hard freeze is one of the cheapest risk-reduction items on a property manager's list — it's a fall booking, not a spring one.

What we do about it

We start by emptying the catch basins serving the affected area and checking whether water then leaves as it should. If it doesn't, the restriction is downstream and we move to line jetting. If both come back clean and water still pools, the issue is grading and you need pavement work — at which point at least you know exactly what you're buying.