Our first flood
I was supposed to be at the airport by now, but that’s not in the cards for tonight. Instead I’m catching my breath after pulling a couple hundred gallons of water out of our basement—where there is still a standing inch in places.
The rain has been steady here for days, but until sometime today we didn’t have any problems. When I checked our basement and garage at 6:15 am after taking the dogs out, everything was fine—maybe a little water coming in under the garage door.
What a difference six hours can make. I went downstairs after coming home from church to get some kitchen garbage bags and found the carpet in the library room drenched and water standing in the utility room. I opened the garage door to find more water in there. I stood staring for a minute, then pulled stuff off the floor and got to work.
I used our 12-gallon wet/dry vac and, after lifting it up to the laundry sink a few times to drain, eventually figured out I could just leave it up there and vacuum from there. I then vacuumed and drained, vacuumed and drained, until I realized that the sink was draining more slowly than I was vacuuming. I took a break and came back to find the water back to the level it was originally. Gritting my teeth, I started again, but the sink filled again in a few minutes. So I took a minute and went out to the garage, grabbed a broom and started sweeping water out the door and into the French drain, which was pooled almost to the cement high point at the garage door.
Mercifully at this point I started thinking. Didn’t that drain actually work once upon a time? I grabbed a pitchfork, levered the French drain grate out of the way, and pulled a couple spadesful of dirt out of the drain. And it started draining. Then I broomed out the garage, mostly, and went back into the utility room to note that the overall level seemed lower. I got a few more shopvacs full of water out of the utility room floor, then took a break to warm up. And here I sit, warming.
And thinking. On the one hand, most of our stuff was off the floor—bookshelves, utility shelves, etc. And the new HVAC gear was built high off the floor and floodproof. On the minus side, a lot of temporary stuff got damp, and we’ll now have to rip up the carpet in the room in the next week. We definitely need to get a sump pump down there. And I need to keep the French drain clear more often, so the next time it rains 12 inches in six days we won’t be back in this place again.
But mostly I need to get back down there and start shopvac’ing again. Sigh.
