damp proof courses and stuff

[ooo000ooo]

How long should one last? We've a bit of a strange situation with the neighbours garage. there's 4 garages backing onto each other, our garage is the lowest, the top of the slab it was built on is slightly above the bottom of the neighbours foundations and at least 12" below their DPC, the 2 garages behind are both higher again.
water pools in the void at the corner of our garage but at the worst could only be 6" deep.
The neighbour was clearing some stuff out of the garage and it's quite damp mostly up the wall at the corner where all 4 garages meet and he currently has water seeping out of a gap in the steps at his patio at the front of his garage at a similar level to his DPC.
Would it be possible for water to be sucked up through the concrete foundations, making his garage damp and then seeping out a good 17-20 feet away? His garage has been up nearly 40 years, ours nearly 30 and this is the first time it's happened!
The water seeping out on his patio smells stagnant like the water at the back of ours.
After clearing as much crap out of the space as i could yesterday the seeping seemed worse although there's only about an inch of water in there?

Edited by ooo000ooo on Monday 12th April 13:00

[GreenDog]

Stagnant water doesn't sound good - burst pipe somewhere by the sounds of.

[ooo000ooo]

the gutter on our garage just empties into the void at the back of the garage and IIRC just ran off along the side of the garage into a drain. there has never been a proper drain for it. I'm going to reroute the downspout to drain it into the garden. It's worked ok for many years so i suspect/hope that the neighbours problem may be coming from somewhere else