needsalt
a well lived bland life
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When it rains...
This evening after Nora went to bed Anna and I relaxed and watched some TV. I settled back and decided to take a snooze. Around 11:30 Anna wakes me up in a panic and asks if the carbon monoxide alarm was going off. In my sleepy stupor I stumble downstairs to find a growing puddle of water in the middle of the laundry room floor. I was now close enough to the incredibly loud alarm that my ears were ringing and I was unable to figure out where the noise was coming from. We don't have a sump pump (YET!) so it couldn't be any alarm associated with that. Well it turns out that Anna was right, it was the carbon monoxide detector. It was having a tough time checking out air quality while it was under water.
Where was all this water coming from? The past few days have been very hot and humid days and each night the heat and humidity formed into large thunderstorms. It has rained the past three nights in a row and it was not only raining at this time, it was POURING! We have a drain in the floor of the laundry room that usually drains water very well and at this point it was doing the reverse and water was coming up out of the drain.
Here's a picture of the storm rolling in earlier this evening.
I located our utility water pump then went in search of our garden hoses. This is when I found out just exactly how much it was raining. In the time it took me to disconnect the hose from the house I was drenched from head to toe. I hooked the hose up to the pump then ran the hose out to the street but found a flowing river instead. There was so much water that the intersection near our house was flooded completely across and cars were comtemplating crossing the road. I've never seen so much water running down the street before.
After returning inside I headed back to the basement to see what else I could do. By this time the water was spreading to all rooms of the basement. I immediately began picking stuff off the floor and carrying it upstairs to Anna who put all the stuff in the kitchen. Between trips of carrying stuff the water was progressing several feet across the basement floor.
We finally got everything we needed off the floor and headed back up stairs. I called a friend to find how deep I could let the water get before needing to turn off the fuse to the furnace. I noticed that the kitchen floor had bloody toe prints all over the floor. Somewhere along the way I cut two of my toes fairly badly leaving my big toe with a small chunk missing. Anna doctored me up and I headed back to figuring out what to do next.
The rain finally quit shortly after midnight and the water crested at just over three inches at the bottom of our steps and slightly deeper near the drain in the floor. I spent the next three hours checking the water pump, scooping buckets of water, and using my homemade squeegy to clean up water. I'm somewhat proud of my squeegy. I made it out of a broom handle and a spare windshield wiper I had in the garage, check it out.
It's now after 4am. I've showered and I'm now watching Cheers reruns and waiting for the drain in the basement to be completely empty before going to sleep. Tomorrrow I need to figure out how to re-light our water heater pilot light as that went out (currently turned off) and also figure out what I'm going to do about work. Needless to say, I see a sump pump in our future.
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Blando's Blog
Disciple of Christ, Husband, Father, and IT-guy.
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