Mamba Drainage Services
Catch Basin Cleaning Vancouver
Parkade flooding every atmospheric river. Restaurant patio drain backing up. Yard drain overflowing onto the patio. Catch basins silt up fast in Vancouver, and a full basin cannot take the flow when the storm arrives.
Vacuum truck, hydrojet and camera inspection on every visit, for commercial, strata and residential sites across Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster. You get the footage and the written report, not just a clean grate.
Why Vancouver catch basins silt up fast
A catch basin is the underground concrete or fiberglass chamber that collects surface water from a parkade, a patio, a parking lot or a yard drain before routing it to the storm sewer or a daylighted outflow. It is sized to hold a few gallons of sediment between cleanings, and it fills faster than most property owners expect.
A typical Vancouver parkade basin captures fine sand, gravel, leaves, road salt residue, oil off vehicles and the occasional plastic bag. Sediment compacts in the bottom of the chamber and creeps up past the inlet and outlet pipes. The basin ends up half full of packed silt with both pipes partly blocked. Then an atmospheric river lands, the basin cannot drain fast enough, and the water backs up onto the parkade floor or the restaurant patio.
Commercial parkade and parking lot basins. Big box retail, office complexes and strata parkades. Vacuum truck pulls the accumulated silt, hydrojet clears the inlet and outlet pipes, camera confirms the storm lateral is running clean.
Restaurant patio and outdoor seating drains. Commercial Drive and downtown patios run trench drains and small basins for surface water. Grease off outdoor cooking, food debris and patio runoff fill them faster than anything residential.
Residential yard basins and lawn drains. Properties with slopes, low spots or surface drainage problems. Heritage homes in Strathcona and Mount Pleasant often have older brick or concrete yard drains that silt up quietly until the lawn starts holding water.
What we find at the bottom of the chamber tells you what the site is actually doing. Fine sand and grit means the surface is shedding material and the grate is too coarse for it. Leaf litter packed into a mat means the basin sits under trees and needs a tighter cycle in the autumn. Oil and a grey emulsion means vehicle traffic, which is normal for a parkade and is the reason the disposal has to go to a proper facility rather than down another drain.
The failure is rarely the basin itself. Concrete and fiberglass chambers outlive most of what is buried around them. What fails is the outlet pipe leaving the chamber, because that is where the silt that got past the sump settles out and where roots find a joint to open. That is why a clean that stops at the vacuum step is only half the job, and why the camera goes down the outlet before we call the visit finished.
Access is the other half of the job and it is the part that gets underestimated. A parkade basin under a parked car is a basin nobody cleaned. A grate seized into its frame by years of grit needs breaking free before anything else happens. A restaurant patio basin buried under decking gets skipped on every visit until the patio floods. We walk the site and confirm we can physically reach every chamber before the truck is booked, because a mobilization that reaches four of the six basins on the drawing has not solved anything.
24/7 emergency dispatch
Book the clean before the parkade floods again
Parkade went under last November? Patio backing up? Get the basin vacuumed, the pipes jetted and the outlet on camera, and you find out whether you are dealing with silt or with capacity. One of those is a maintenance line item. The other is a design problem, and guessing between them is how a site floods twice in the same winter. Ryan picks up, and you get a real arrival window on the call.
Catch basin cleaning FAQ, Vancouver
It depends on what feeds them. Residential yard basins come around on an annual cycle. Restaurant patio drains need a much tighter one because of the grease load. Commercial parkade basins run annual to semi annual depending on traffic, and a heavy use big box parking lot needs it quarterly. The honest answer for any specific site comes off the first clean. We record how much material came out of each chamber, and that volume sets the cycle for the site far better than a rule of thumb does.
Vacuum truck pulls the sediment out of the chamber, hydrojet clears the inlet and outlet pipes, camera confirms the storm lateral is clear, and you get a written report with photos and a certificate of service. The order matters. Jetting a chamber that is still full of silt just pushes the silt into the outlet, so the vacuum always goes first.
Yes. Parkades and tenant sensitive sites are routinely scheduled after hours or on weekends so nobody loses a parking level during the working day. Contract clients pay no after hours premium.
Yes. Cracked lids, damaged grates and failed outlet pipe connections. The repair is quoted separately and usually gets paired with a clean so the underlying cause gets dealt with at the same time. A broken grate is worth fixing quickly for a reason that has nothing to do with drainage. It is a hole in a floor that people and vehicles cross, and it becomes a liability question long before it becomes a flooding question.
Either the surface drainage is overloading it, which points at upgraded grates or additional basins, or the outlet is restricted, which the jet and camera will find. Those are two very different bills, so we quote the fix after the diagnostic visit rather than guessing at it. Sites that flood twice usually paid for a clean when they needed a capacity change.
Yes. Residential, commercial, strata and multi site portfolios, each on its own cycle. Contract clients get emergency priority between scheduled visits. See our drainage maintenance programs.
The vacuum truck takes the load to a Metro Vancouver waste facility. We follow City of Vancouver bylaws on storm water sediment disposal and the disposal documentation goes into your compliance reporting.
Yes, on every commercial cleaning. The scope runs from the chamber to the storm lateral connection and proves free flow. Footage is emailed as an MP4. See video inspection.
Anything on the strata side of the property line is the strata’s, which normally covers the parkade basins, the ramp drain and the laterals running to the connection. The City owns what sits in the road allowance. If there is any doubt about where the line falls, the camera scope settles it, because the footage shows exactly where your pipe ends and the City’s begins. That footage is also what a council needs in front of it before it votes money at an annual general meeting.
No. The truck parks at the ramp and we work one basin at a time, so a level stays usable while the crew moves through it. Where a basin sits in a stall we ask building management to cone it off ahead of the visit. Tenants keep their parking, we keep our access, and nobody spends the morning looking for the crew.
24/7 EMERGENCY DISPATCH
Water where it should not be?
Ryan picks up. Live dispatch, and you get a real arrival window on the call.