The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up

Thanks to all the well wishers from my last post! Your encouragement is much appreciated:)

Well, the title of this says it all.

Yesterday afternoon at about three, we decided to move furniture around in the girls' room. It had been drizzling all day long. I knew that it was making the snow melt, but until I went upstairs and looked out our top deck, I had no idea what was going on. Pretty much a river was flowing through my neighbor's yard, into his house and back out the front of his house. Not around his house, through it. Another river was on the side of his house between his and his other next door neighbor's houses. A third river was flowing behind that neighbors' house. These rivers were two to three feet deep and just as wide. It was crazy.

Two houses away neighbor didn't have water in her house yet and we couldn't get ahold of next door neighbor. Two houses away neighbor had next door neighbor's house key and went inside to find their basement filled with about 6 inches of water. I grabbed our pump and hoses and ran over with them. While I was hooking stuff up the fire department, police department and county somebody showed up. This was worse than last time.

We set up another pump in two houses away neighbor's crawl space. I checked ours and we were fine, but I knew that our turn would come. The county reassured us by saying they were bringing in a team of supervised inmates to help sand bag and asked that we provide an additional 30 people to help. No problem with that. It's great to belong to a church that is so proactive about emergency preparedness.

While everyone sand bagged the creeks and bailed water I made dinners and watched kids and made hot chocolate for all the helpers. Once again, grateful to have my food storage. At about eight or nine, we noticed water leaking into our crawl space so we hooked up our pump. By ten we had two pumps in there and were bailing water by hand. It was really so awesome to see so many people helping us all out.

Workers left around eleven when they hand sand bagged the creeks enough to divert the water from running into our houses. I need to explain that the water doesn't leak in through windows or doors, it comes in through the ground, through the foundations.

In a nutshell, it rained all day until ten when the rain turned to light snow. Two feet of snow melted. The golf course behind us has some big huge pipes that are supposed to flow into the creeks, but they were blocked and that's why they came to our houses. We had a ten gallon bucket that we were bailing water into and had a pump in there as well. To give you an idea of how much water we are talking about just in our house, which had the least amount of water, we bailed and pumped until 1:30 a.m. and continued to pump with two pumps, one with a fire hose attached (thanks fire department:)) until eight this morning. Then, we would just use the fire hose pump every half an hour for about a half an hour until eleven. All morning I have been bailing water and using a wet vacuum and it's three now. And the smaller of the two pumps is still going strong. When the ten gallon bucket gets full I set the small pump in it to drain the water. It takes fifteen seconds. The small pump has been pumping water for a solid 19 hours!!!! The large one went for twelve hours. That is a lot of water.

It was great to see so many people pull together to help each other. It was extra great that our basement is unfinished and that we will now have an opportunity to figure this problem out before we finish it.

For now this is Noah, signing off. I'm off to bail some more water:)