This basement used to get water in it every spring, coming in from the east wall. I eventually cured that problem by extending the eavestroughs at the eastern end of the house so that the rainwater would get dumped about 10 feet out from the house instead of right at the edge of the walls. That seems to have fixed it. It's much drier now. (I assume all that water was saturating the soil on the east end and slowly leeching right through the concrete walls and foundation.) As for the concrete floor, I've covered most of it with synthetic floor tiles (they're made of some kind of thin plastic material that looks like a ceramic floor tile). There used to be a ratty old carpet down there (terrible idea!) and it got mouldy, of course, so I ripped it all out, used bleach and vinegar on the floors to kill the mould, dried the place out, then put down the plastic tiles over the concrete. And I use dehumifiers down there in the warm weather. So far, so good.

The water table is definitely higher than the basement floor. I have a sump pump here, and it runs quite frequently. When and if the sump pump fails (which has happened the odd time), the basement will flood to a depth of a few inches of water...assuming one stood back and did nothing about it. There's always been someone here to do something about it when that happened. In the case of an extended power failure, the only recourse would be to run the sump pump with a generator, and I had to do that on one occasion.