Cicero, NY
Drain, Sewer and Sump Pump Work Across the Town of Cicero
A flooded Cicero basement is far more often a sump pump that lost the race than a sewer that backed up, and those are different jobs at different prices.
What is the drain doing?
- One drain is slow or cloggedUsually means a branch line: that one fixture's own pipe.Send: Drain cleaning
- Several drains are slow, or it keeps coming backUsually means the main line or the lateral under the yard.Send: Main line cleaning
- Water came up through a basement drainUsually means a sewer backup, shown first by the lowest drain.Send: Backup crew
- I need a camera look or a repair priceUsually means a damaged lateral that needs a camera first.Send: Camera and repair
- Not sure what it isSay what you see and we will name the job.Send: We will sort it
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Say what the drain is doing in Cicero and the right crew follows up.
What is different underground in Cicero
Cicero's documented basement flooding is groundwater beating a sump pump, not a sewer backing up. That points at pump capacity, a second pump, and a battery backup rather than at the drain line, and it is a different repair with a different price.
Source: Onondaga County 2025 Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan (checked September 8, 2026).
Northern Cicero drains to Brewerton, not to Oak Orchard or Metro, and it does so through a chain of pump stations. That is the third distinct sewer basin in a single town, so the right county contact for a Cicero address depends on which end of the town it is.
Source: Onondaga County Department of Water Environment Protection (checked September 8, 2026).
What Cicero owners ask after a wet basement
My Cicero house is from the 1990s. Can the drain still be at fault?
The pipe itself rarely is. On stock of that age the joints do not fail the way mortared clay does, so what a technician expects to find is a deposit or an object in the branch. It is still worth having the line looked at if the same fixture blocks twice, because a poorly graded run behaves like a blockage even when nothing is stuck.
Does Cicero drain to the Metro plant like the city does?
No. The north of the town is served by the Brewerton Water Pollution Control Plant on Guy Young Road, which opened in 1974 and takes flow through a series of pump stations into the Lakeshore and Orangeport trunk sewers. That matters because a pumped system has failure modes a gravity run does not, and they are the county's to fix.
How do I tell groundwater from a sewer backup in a Cicero basement?
Start with where it appeared and what it looked like. Clear water arriving near the sump pit or along the floor and wall joint in a downpour is groundwater, which is what the town's own hazard record describes around Brewerton. Discolored water with an odor rising through a floor drain or a tub is the sanitary line. If in doubt, photograph it before cleanup, because the answer is much harder to reconstruct afterwards.
How deep does a new sewer line have to be in Cicero?
The county requirement is 48 inches of cover for a building sewer, and insulation board where the cover is less than that. Pumped sewers and force mains carry the same 48 inches, described as six inches more than frost depth. The county also cautions that insulation board over a shallow line with little or no flow is not effective here, because such a line has no self-heating effect.
Wet basement and drain work we arrange around Brewerton
Drain cleaning
Cicero houses are young by county standards, so a blocked fixture here is usually about what went down it. That is the cheap diagnosis and it is normally the right one.
Main line cleaning
Cicero does not run downhill to Metro. It is pumped, through trunk sewers, which is why a whole-house slowdown here deserves one phone call before it gets a machine.
Backup crew
Groundwater beating a sump pump and sewage returning up a drain look similar on a wet floor and cost nothing like the same. We name which one you had before anything is priced.
Camera and repair
A survey tells you the material, the depth and the distance to the fault. In Cicero it also flags two requirements that get discovered mid-trench when nobody looked first.
The $100 credit in Cicero
Send details for your Cicero property. The credit applies to your first booked job.
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- No obligation, and no pressure to dig.
- Credited by us on your first booked job.
- One credit per customer per property, on the first booked job.
- Valid through December 31, 2026.
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The Drain Cleaning Syracuse guarantee
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Which end of Cicero you are on decides who to call
The town's hazard annex records a storm dropping up to six inches in a short time in which many homes around Brewerton flooded when sump pumps were overwhelmed.
Cicero is served by two different county plants, and the right contact depends on which end of the town your address sits in. The north drains to the Brewerton Water Pollution Control Plant on Guy Young Road, opened in 1974 after the Lakeshore Sanitary District consolidated three smaller plants and fed by a chain of pump stations into the Lakeshore and Orangeport trunk sewers.
- Other parts of Cicero go to Oak Orchard in Clay.
- Neither is Metro, so a Cicero main that has stopped moving is a pump station question first.
- What the town's own record shows about wet basements is more useful still.
- The county hazard annex describes a storm producing up to six inches of rainfall in a short time over urbanized land in which many homes in the Brewerton area took on basement water when their sump pumps were overwhelmed by the inflow, and it lists many flood-prone spots, among them Cicero Swamp at Route 298, Beach Road and Vistula Road.
- That is groundwater beating a pump, not sewage coming back up a pipe, and the answer is pump capacity, a second pump and a battery backup rather than a drain repair.
- Only 10.6 percent of Cicero housing predates 1950, so a failed clay joint is the less likely finding here.
- The county's own list of backup causes puts blockages, wet weather inflow and tree roots first, alongside sump pumps, roof drains and gutters wrongly connected to the sanitary sewer, and that last one is the item you can have checked in an afternoon.
Nearby towns
Tell us what happened in your Cicero basement
Send your ZIP code and what you saw. There is no obligation, and if this is a pump rather than a pipe we will say so.