I have a weird question.... We have a brick dual ceramic flue chimney (maybe 1 ft x 3 ft) running up the side of our house. In the basement the footing for this chimney is less than two feet below ground (it does NOT go to the basement floor). The top has a cap. The part that is underground was brick, but two years ago I had a cement wall built around this underground brick, maybe 2 or three inches think, basically a foundation wall built around the underground portion of the chimney. I had this done because anytime we got a huge rainstorm (3+ inches in a day), the underground portion of the chimney would fill with water. This worked for over two years and many big storms until the storm we just got in New England. We got about 5 inches of rain in 24 hours. The chimney stayed dry until we hit the 4 inch mark in rain, then started to slowly fill with water. I pulled about 10 gallons from it using a wet vac. The outside is sloped away from the chimney and there no standing water. So my thoughts are:
Water must be coming up from bottom. My thought (and probably dead wrong), was to buy floor leveler and pour in a new base ("floor") inside the chimney cleanout maybe an inch or so thick? There can't be that much pressure pushing up as these cleanouts sit maybe 3-4 feet above the basement floor and no water is coming in through basement floor. Below is very crude diagram.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- basement ceiling | | | | ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ground level | | | | | xxxx xxxx |