10/21/2026
Your roof sheds about 1,000 gallons of water for every inch of rain. 🌧️
That's for a house with a footprint around 1,600 square feet. Bigger house, more water. Your gutters catch most of it and send it out through a handful of downspouts, so a whole roof's worth of rain lands in a few spots.
Go look at where yours let go. If one empties right beside the driveway, the patio or the garage slab, that corner of concrete is getting hundreds of gallons dumped at its base every time it rains.
Concrete doesn't mind water rolling on top. It minds what water does underneath. A soaked base turns soft and washes out, and the slab edge above it has nothing left to sit on. That's how driveway edges break off and patio corners sink, and then the concrete gets blamed for it.
The fix is cheap: a downspout extension that carries the water several feet out, past the slab, or down to a gravel bed that drains. Ten minutes and a trip to the hardware store.
