The Flood

The best word to describe the last 4 months would be CRAZY!!! It all started in the end of march when Mike left on a trip to Arkansas. An hour before he left we realized something was wrong with the computer, it would not boot. But he didn't have enough time to work on it so it was left not working for a week and what ended up to be a couple of months (more on this later). Anyway, the night before we had both noticed the cracks in the basement getting more and more damp. We had been watching the cracks get water spots over the previous several weeks, and our sump pump was going off every 7 seconds. Well, Mike had to leave so he told me to keep him posted. He left Sunday at noon.

At 9:00 that night I checked the basement...We were flooding! I called all my family and they showed up within minutes! At that point I just had a few puddles at the edge of the foundation and coming in some of the cracks. It was coming in very slowly so we had a chance to move all our stuff to the middle of the room on boards. We couldn't do anything to stop it though until the next day so I just got to watch it come in. I slept horribly that night! I kept dreaming there was 5 feet of water in the basement. I did go down once in the middle of the night, it was soooo creepy! It sounded like small crickets everywhere in the basement. As the water seaped in it pushed the air out which made a whistle noise. It was aweful, and all while Mike was gone. The next morning I woke up to water almost everywhere in the basement. At its deepest it was 1 and a half inches.

My mom came the next day to help me move things around. This is the water in our cold storage. It was almost to the top of the board. Nick and Andi thought it was AWESOME! They had always wanted a splash pool in the basement!

Tuesday morning we finally got a plumber in to dig a 2 foot deep hole in the basement and drop in a second sump pump. This is the sump pump and you can see all the water under our foundation. There was a TON of water under our house. We were pumping about 60-70 gallons a minute!

Eventually 5 of the 10 homes in our neighborhood flooded but we got it the worst. The Mayor of Hyde Park even came and marveled at the water feature in front of our house! Anyway we eventually found out our storm drains in our neighborhood are not tied to anything else so the wet spring we had artificially elevated our water table level. Once the 2nd pump was in we were able to keep the water out of our house. Mike finally came back the following Saturday and by then all the water had been cleaned up. Perfect timing on his part!!! Glad that was over too! Thank you to everyone who helped us get through it!