Elwood's Low-Lying Blocks and Stormwater

Elwood is honest about its history if you know where to look. Elster Creek runs through it in a concrete canal, the streets sit low and flat behind the foreshore, and much of the suburb was swampland before it was drained and subdivided a century ago. Water has not forgotten. In a serious downpour, Elwood is one of the first places in Melbourne where stormwater backs up, and the low-lying streets around the canal have flooded more than once in living memory.

For homeowners and the many apartment owners in the suburb’s Art Deco blocks, this is not a reason to move. It is a reason to understand how the drainage on your own property works, because on a low block the difference between a wet garden and water through the door often comes down to details you can control.

On a normal block, stormwater falls on the roof, runs down the downpipes, and flows by gravity through underground pipes to the street drain, which sits lower than the house. On the lowest blocks in Elwood that last assumption fails. Parts of some properties sit at or below the level of the street drainage, so gravity has nothing to work with. Worse, when the council system in the street is running full during a storm, water can push backwards up private stormwater lines.

Low blocks therefore rely on three things working together: pits that collect water from paved areas and garden low points, a pump where gravity cannot finish the job, and an overflow path so that when everything else is overwhelmed, water flows somewhere harmless instead of through the living room.

A stormwater pit is a buried box with a grate on top, placed at a low point. Water falls in, silt settles, and a pipe carries the water away. Pits only work while the grate is clear and the pit is not full of sediment, which in a leafy suburb means they need cleaning, not just installing.

A pump pit adds a submersible pump with a float switch. When water in the pit rises, the pump pushes it up and out to the legal point of discharge. Pumps are the unsung heroes of low-lying Elwood, and also its most neglected asset. A pump that has sat idle since the last wet winter may be seized, its float jammed under a stray root, or its non-return valve stuck, and nobody finds out until the water is already rising. If your property has one, it should be test-run before storm season, every year, without exception.

The overflow path is the part everyone forgets. Ask yourself: when the pit is full, the pump has failed and the rain is still coming, where does the water go? On a well-designed block the answer is across a path or lawn and out to the street, staying below floor level the whole way. On plenty of renovated blocks the answer has accidentally become "through the back door", because paving was raised, a garden bed was built up, or an extension interrupted the old flow path. Landscaping decisions cause as many floods here as blocked drains do.

A large share of Elwood lives in flats, and drainage in a 1930s block is a shared affair. The stormwater lines, pits and any pumps generally belong to the owners corporation, not to individual lot owners, so maintenance happens only if someone puts it on the agenda. If you own or manage a ground-floor flat in a low-lying block, it is worth asking three questions at the next meeting: when were the stormwater drains last inspected with a camera, who tests the pump if there is one, and where is the overflow path for the courtyard and light wells.

Ground-floor courtyards in these blocks are a recurring trouble spot. They are often lower than the surrounding land, drained by a single small grate, and the original earthenware line under them has had ninety years of root growth and ground movement. One camera inspection settles what condition it is really in.

Most storm flooding we attend in Elwood had warning signs that were visible weeks earlier. This checklist covers the items that matter most, roughly in order of effort.

Clearing grates and testing a pump float are jobs anyone can do. The underground work is not. In Victoria, repairs and alterations to stormwater drainage, new pits and pump installations, and connections to the point of discharge are licensed plumbing work. Blocked underground lines also genuinely need the right equipment: a jetter clears silt and roots properly where a hardware-store snake just pokes a hole through them, and a camera shows whether the pipe has failed or merely clogged. We show you that footage before we quote anything.

We look after blocked and failed stormwater drains across Elwood and the surrounding Bayside suburbs, for houses, owners corporations and property managers. If your block is one of the low ones, the best time to find out what your drainage is really doing is a dry Tuesday, not the third hour of a hundred-millimetre rain event.