Water Damage Restoration — Downtown & Shooks Run
80903 and 80907 hold Colorado Springs' oldest continuously occupied neighbourhoods — the Old North End, Middle Shooks Run and downtown. Century-old clay sewer laterals under a mature tree canopy, stone foundations, and an urban drainage running straight through the middle of it.
- ✓IICRC-certified technicians
- ✓Work to the IICRC S500 standard
- ✓Licensed and insured
- ✓Downtown, Old North End, Middle Shooks Run and Holland Park
Water damage
What makes water damage different downtown?
Age, density, and a drainage that runs between the houses rather than around the neighbourhood.
The Old North End and the Shooks Run neighbourhoods were built out largely between the 1890s and the 1930s, and the housing has been continuously occupied and continuously modified ever since. Downtown itself mixes century-old commercial buildings with newer infill, and a good deal of the older residential stock has been divided into apartments over the last eighty years.
Five consequences you do not get elsewhere in the metro:
Shooks Run. A named drainage running north–south through the residential grid, with a trail alongside it. Most neighbourhoods have a creek at the edge. This one has water running through its middle.
The tree canopy. The Old North End’s mature streetscape is one of the reasons people live there. Those root systems sit directly over century-old clay sewer laterals.
Stone and rubble foundations. The oldest houses here sit on stone rather than poured concrete, and stone foundations move, weep and take water differently.
Multi-unit conversions. A single-family Victorian divided into three apartments has one set of supply lines, one lateral, and three tenants — and a failure upstairs becomes a loss in every unit below.
Mixed-use downtown. A residential unit or office above a restaurant or retail tenant, in a building where the plumbing serves both. One failure, two insurers, two leases and a shared structure.
Colorado Springs
Which neighbourhoods are we covering?
Downtown core (80903). Commercial, mixed-use and newer residential infill around Tejon, Nevada and Cascade, with basements and cellars under much of the older commercial stock.
Middle Shooks Run (80903). Residential, pre-1940, running along the Shooks Run drainage and trail. Historic character, older infrastructure, and a mix of owner-occupied and rental.
Old North End (80903, 80907). The city’s flagship historic residential neighbourhood north of Colorado College. Large late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century homes, mature canopy, and the highest concentration of original building fabric in the city.
North-central and Holland Park (80907). 1940s–60s stock north of the Old North End, more conventional construction, some Monument Creek proximity.
Landmarks that matter hydrologically rather than scenically: Shooks Run and its trail corridor, Monument Creek along the western edge, the Monument–Fountain Creek confluence at the zone’s southwest corner, Colorado College, and Palmer Park to the east feeding runoff westward.
Water damage
What is Shooks Run and why does it matter?
It is an urban drainage that runs north–south through the east side of downtown, and it is the reason this neighbourhood floods differently from the rest of the city.
Most Colorado Springs neighbourhoods sit near a creek. Shooks Run runs through its neighbourhood — between the houses, under the streets, alongside a trail, in a corridor that has been progressively channelised and built around for more than a century.
What that means practically:
Water arrives sideways, not from below. A storm dropping on Palmer Park and the slopes to the east sheds westward into this corridor. Properties adjacent to the drainage take water at grade — through window wells, basement stairwells, and low doorways — rather than through the cove joint.
The corridor is constrained. A channel with a century of streets, bridges and utilities crossing it has limited capacity, and constraint points are where water leaves the channel.
Street flooding is a real mechanism here. Downtown’s older stormwater infrastructure, combined with a grid that funnels toward the drainage, produces surface flooding in intense monsoon cells — and downtown basements and cellars sit right at the bottom of that.
The insurance point: water arriving over land from outdoors is flood, and standard homeowners policies exclude it. That is true whether it came from Shooks Run overtopping, from the street, or across your neighbour’s yard. Flood coverage is separate — through the NFIP or a private carrier, with a 30-day waiting period before it takes effect.
If you are adjacent to the drainage and you do not have flood coverage, that is the most consequential thing on this page.
Coverage depends on your specific policy. We are a restoration contractor, not licensed insurance advisers.
Colorado Springs
Why do sewer backups happen so often in the Old North End?
Because the trees that make the neighbourhood are growing into the pipes that drain it.
Vitrified clay sewer laterals were standard when these houses were built, and a great many are still in service. Clay pipe is laid in short jointed sections, and joints weep slightly. Mature tree roots find that moisture, enter the joint, and grow into a mass inside the pipe.
The Old North End has the densest combination of the two in the city — century-old laterals under a century-old canopy. It is not a defect and it is not neglect. It is what happens when both are old.
The failure pattern is gradual, then sudden. Flow slows over years — a slow drain, a gurgle, a bathroom that backs up when the washer runs — and then one heavy use or one storm surcharge pushes it past capacity and sewage comes back through the lowest fixture in the house.
Two local factors make it worse:
Storm surcharge. During a monsoon storm, stormwater infiltrating the sanitary system raises pressure in the main. A lateral already half-closed by roots has nowhere to put it. This is why backups here cluster on storm days rather than distributing randomly.
Basements below the main. Old houses here often have floor drains, laundry sinks or basement bathrooms set below the street main, installed when backflow prevention was not required. There is nothing stopping the reverse flow.
Sewage is Category 3 water. Containment, protective equipment, HEPA filtration, and removal rather than drying for porous materials. Carpet, pad and drywall the sewage reached come out — they do not get dried and saved. Anyone telling you otherwise is not working to standard.
Water damage
What is different about a stone foundation?
It moves, it weeps, and it does not fail the way the rest of the county does.
Most of El Paso County’s basement water story is cove joint seepage — expansive bentonite clay swelling against a poured concrete foundation and pushing water through the seam where the slab meets the wall. That is the default diagnosis across the metro, and on the north side and the Powers corridor it is right most of the time.
The oldest downtown and Old North End stock does not work that way. Stone or rubble foundations, often with a mortar that has been repointed several times, sit on floors that may be concrete poured decades after the house, brick, or in a few cases still dirt. Water does not come through one identifiable joint. It comes through the wall, at multiple points, and it varies with the season and the irrigation next door.
What that changes for you:
- There is often no single source to fix. A homeowner who calls a plumber gets told, correctly, that there is no leak.
- Metering matters more, not less. Stone and its mortar hold and release moisture differently from concrete, and the readings have to be interpreted against that rather than against a modern baseline.
- Drying takes longer, because thick masonry gives moisture up slowly.
- The fix is usually drainage and grading, not the foundation. Downspout discharge, grading against the wall, and window well drainage do more than anything done to the stone.
What we will not do is tell you what your foundation needs. Structural and soil questions are for a structural or geotechnical engineer. Our job is to find where the water is, document it, and dry the building — and to say plainly when a question is outside our scope.
Water on the floor right now?
Tell us where it came from and how long it has been there. We will give you a time, not a window.
24/7 — Colorado Springs and El Paso County
Colorado Springs
What happens when a converted multi-unit building floods?
One failure becomes three losses, and everybody involved needs the same document.
A lot of the older housing here has been divided into apartments — a Victorian split into three units, a carriage house converted, a basement flat added. They share supply lines, a single lateral, and a structure. Water from a second-floor bathroom does not stay on the second floor.
Who typically covers what:
- The building owner’s policy covers the structure.
- Each tenant’s renters policy covers that tenant’s own belongings — not the building, and not the other tenants’ property.
- If the units are individually owned, the HOA or association policy and the individual unit policies split along whatever the governing documents say.
Which means one incident generates several claims, and they get resolved from a shared record or they get argued from three different memories. We document which units were affected and when — moisture readings, dated photographs, a written scope — and give the same document to everyone with a stake in it.
For landlords and property managers specifically: authorise mitigation immediately. Most policies place a duty on you to prevent further damage, and the cost of waiting overnight for a decision routinely exceeds the cost of the first night’s equipment. A tenant’s habitability complaint accrues while you are waiting, too.
Water damage
Do you work on downtown mixed-use buildings?
Yes, and the mixed-use case downtown has a specific problem worth naming.
A century-old building with a restaurant or retail tenant on the ground floor and offices or apartments above shares one structure and often one set of risers. A supply failure upstairs runs down through the ceiling of a business that has to open tomorrow. A drain failure downstairs backs up into a shared basement where both tenants store things.
Three things make these jobs different:
Two or more sets of insurers and leases. The lease decides who is responsible for what, and it is worth knowing before an incident rather than during one.
Downtime is the real cost for the commercial tenant. The correct sequence is stabilise, contain, get the ground floor trading, then dry the rest — not dry everything then reopen.
Access and hours. Retail cannot lose trading time and restaurants cannot have equipment running during service, so a lot of this work happens between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
And the historic point: parts of downtown and the Old North End contain locally designated historic districts and landmark properties, and the City of Colorado Springs administers preservation review. Mitigation is unaffected — extraction, drying and interior removal proceed immediately. Reconstruction involving exterior work may require review, and materials and timelines can differ from what a standard insurance estimate assumes. Raise it with your adjuster early rather than after the scope is agreed, and check your property’s status with the City rather than assuming.
Colorado Springs
Why does water damage get found late in these houses?
Because the buildings hide it and the climate helps them.
Balloon framing. The oldest stock here has stud cavities running uninterrupted from sill to roof. Water entering at a roof or a second-floor bathroom can travel two storeys down inside a wall and appear in a first-floor ceiling on the other side of the house. The stain is almost never under the leak.
Plaster over wood lath. Thick, dense, and it holds far more water than drywall — and the lath behind it holds water too, in a cavity with no airflow. It also does not stain the way drywall does, so the visible signal is delayed.
Stacked flooring. A century-old house often has original hardwood, then linoleum, then plywood underlayment, then something modern. Water gets between the layers and cannot get out.
And the climate. Dry Colorado air pulls moisture off exposed surfaces fast, so a wall face or a ceiling reads dry within a day or two while the assembly behind it is still wet. No condensation, and usually no musty smell, because the moisture is not reaching the room.
How a wall feels is the least reliable indicator available in this city, and in a balloon-framed plaster house it is worse than useless. We meter against unaffected material of the same type in the same building, and we give you the readings.
Water damage
What losses do you actually get called to here?
Sewer backup — clay laterals, roots and storm surcharge. The signature loss of this zone.
Basement seepage through stone foundations — seasonal, multi-point, no single source.
Shooks Run and street flooding — monsoon season, mid-July to mid-September.
Frozen pipes — uninsulated cellars, unheated additions and enclosed porches converted to living space. Burst risk climbs sharply below about 20°F with six or more hours of exposure.
Multi-unit supply failures — one bathroom, three affected units.
Roof and valley failures — complex Victorian rooflines with valleys and dormers that collect debris and ice.
Downtown commercial and mixed-use — shared risers, shared basements, two tenants, two claims.
Colorado Springs
Can I stop the sewer backups from happening again?
Largely, yes — and on a house in this zone it is worth doing before the next one rather than after.
Scope the lateral. A camera inspection tells you whether roots are already in the pipe and where the intrusion sits. On a century-old clay lateral under a century-old canopy, this is maintenance rather than a precaution. It also gives you evidence: a dated video showing the condition before a loss is worth a great deal if a claim is ever disputed.
Clear and then treat. Mechanical clearing removes the mass; it does not stop it returning. Root treatment slows regrowth, and it needs repeating on a schedule rather than once.
Ask about a backwater valve. It closes against reverse flow when the main surcharges, which is exactly the storm-day mechanism that produces most backups here. Whether your configuration suits one depends on how your drainage is laid out — a licensed plumber can tell you, and permitted work goes through the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department.
Know where your cleanout is. In a lot of these houses it has been buried, paved over or landscaped across at some point in the last hundred years. Finding it at 11 p.m. with sewage on the basement floor is the wrong time.
Consider spot repair or lining where the camera finds a specific failed joint. Full lateral replacement in an established neighbourhood with mature trees and a paved street is expensive and disruptive; a targeted repair often is not.
And keep the gutters and area drains clear. Roof and surface water finding its way into the sanitary system through a cracked lateral or an old connection makes surcharge worse for you and for everyone downstream of you.
One thing worth saying plainly: none of the above is our trade. We do the cleanup. A licensed plumber does the lateral. We mention it because the households we return to twice are almost always the ones where nobody looked at the pipe after the first time.
Water damage
How fast can you reach downtown and the Old North End?
80903 and 80907 are among the quickest addresses in the metro for us, and we will give you a time rather than a window.
Two honest local qualifiers: downtown parking and alley access mean equipment sometimes has to be carried further than usual, and multi-unit buildings need someone with keys — if you are a tenant, tell us on the phone whether you can get us into the affected units, because that is the most common cause of delay on a job we have already arrived at.
Call (719) 618-9013. Give us the cross streets, whether it is a single-family or a converted multi-unit, and whether the water is still coming in.
📞 Call (719) 618-9013Colorado Springs
What happens when you call
- 1Four questions. Where the water came from, how long it has been there, what it has reached, and how many units are involved.
- 2A time, not a window.
- 3We meter before we quote, and you get the readings and the photographic record — one document, shared with every party who needs it.
Call (719) 618-9013 — Downtown, Old North End, Middle Shooks Run and Holland Park, 24/7.
📞 Call (719) 618-9013Frequently asked
Questions people actually ask
Why does my Old North End basement flood during storms?
Is my house at risk from Shooks Run?
Why is the water stain nowhere near the leak?
I rent a converted apartment downtown — who pays?
Can you dry a stone foundation basement?
Will historic designation hold up my repairs?
Call Dry Standard Restoration
IICRC-certified. We meter before we quote, and you get the readings.
24/7 — Colorado Springs and El Paso County