Epoxy Floor Coatings in the Village of the Branch, NY

The Village of the Branch is small - 1,735 residents at the 2020 census on just under a square mile of land - and it sits where Route 25 meets Route 111, Route 25A and Nissequogue Road, about a mile east of the Smithtown village center. It incorporated in 1927 and is one of three incorporated villages in the Town of Smithtown. Its historic core is old even by north shore standards: the Village of the Branch Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, covers 20 acres and takes in 15 houses, a church and a library built between about 1700 and 1965, and the Halliock Inn and the First Presbyterian Church are individually listed as well. Around that core, Suffolk County's hazard mitigation plan describes a village with almost no vacant land, made up of shopping centers, office buildings, residential subdivisions and historical sites.

The village handles its own permits. Under the Village of the Branch Code, the village's Code Enforcement Officer issues a building permit once proposed work complies with the Uniform Code and the Energy Code, so the village building inspector, not the Town of Smithtown, is the office to call before anything structural. Zoning is tighter than people expect, too: a Residence A lot must be at least 21,780 square feet, which is half an acre, and a Residence B lot at least 7,500 square feet. Coating a slab that already exists is maintenance and does not usually come into it. The commercial buildings are the other half of the work here, and a floor in an office, shop or retail back room gets specified around downtime and foot traffic rather than around a car.

Clay Under the Village, and Water With Nowhere to Drain

Most of Suffolk County sits on glacial sand and gravel that drains fast. The Branch does not, or not everywhere. A 1983 USGS reconnaissance by Richard Krulikas and Edward Koszalka mapped an extensive clay unit across north-central Suffolk County, the Smithtown clay, whose main area is bounded on the south by the Ronkonkoma moraine and on the north by the Harbor Hill moraine, and which reaches a maximum thickness of 170 feet in the northern part of the Town of Smithtown. When the New York State Geological Association ran a field trip across central Long Island in 1996, it stopped at the Route 25 and Route 111 junction in this village to make the point, noting the poor drainage on the proglacial lake-bottom clay beds of the Smithtown Clay as a reminder of the geologic history of this lowland. Where clay lies close to the surface, rain and snowmelt that reach it stop draining down and start moving sideways, and a slab poured over that ground stays in contact with wet soil long after the same storm has drained away through sand elsewhere.

The county's numbers back that up. Suffolk County's hazard mitigation plan calls the Northeast Branch of the Nissequogue River one of the most widely recognized areas affected by shallow groundwater flooding in the county, ranks shallow groundwater a high hazard for this village, and counts 707 Branch residents - 39.9 percent of the village - as exposed to it. For a floor, that is the line between vapor and water. A moisture-mitigation primer, the class of two-component resin membrane ASTM F3010 covers, is built to control vapor emission coming up through concrete. It is not built to hold back liquid water pushed up under pressure when the water table rises against the underside of a basement or garage slab. So on a Branch property the first question is whether the floor has ever been wet rather than damp: tide lines on the walls, efflorescence along the base, rust rings under anything stored on the slab. If the answer is yes, the drainage gets solved before the coating does, and the moisture test is repeated in a wet month as well as a dry one.

See Village of the Branch, NY on Google Maps — we cover the whole area from Smithtown.