The Damage From The Storm

Last night, or should I say early this morning (12:30) we had over an inch of rain in a very short time. Your probably thinking...."That isn't too bad". Well, normally, it isn't bad......at the end of May, we had over 3" in a very short time. This was not "normal". The City is replacing water main and sewer pipes two blocks north of our house. I will try to explain this as best I can.....according to Paul, when they don't cap off the manhole when they aren't working and they have "a big hole" with no where for the water to go, except down the manhole instead of into the storm drains, it creates problems......and the problem happens to be ours.

(this is a photo after daylight that Paul walked up the street to take)


Let me back up......we went down to the basement to sleep when the storm hit so we didn't have to hear the hail. When the storm let up, Paul decided to go upstairs. After he was upstairs, I heard water running so got up and found this:

This is the basement bathroom; water, mud, sludge, was shooting up through the shower drain and then onto the floor. The water also went underneath the wall into the utility room where we keep our deepfreeze, canned goods, etc. That floor was just concrete so not much was damaged except the walls. We assume we will have to tear out the sheet rock and replace it because so much water came in. The water was about 3" deep in the bathroom ONCE the water stopped running into the hallway onto the carpet.

Water also came up into the Garden Tub. You can see about how deep it was.

This is the bathroom floor once the clean up began.

This is the laundry room floor. The floor in there is also concrete but we have the washer, dryer, water softner, furnace, etc. to clean up around. We don't believe there was any damage to any of that. Of course, I would have LOVED to have a new washer and dryer, but that is just my luck for that to be operable. I have already, since this happen, did 4 loads of wash and the current time is only 8 am. The water was also coming up through this drain in the laundry room floor. The sump pub helped a little in this room but the mud that has dried is really no fun to clean up.

We have been awake and cleaning since 12:30 this morning. Both Paul and I have maybe had an hour of sleep. The really bad part of this whole thing is that Paul put his back out last Friday (July 11) and has not been working or doing much of anything since then. So thank goodness for our wonderful friend Kerri who was so kind to come over AND stay until 5 this morning and help us make some sense of the mess. Our neighbor lent us his shop vac so we could at least run two shop vacs and get it all up as quickly as possible. We still have a full day or so of clean up work and need to call the insurance company and go from there.

So far, out of our block, we are the ONLY ones who had any water in their basements. We are going to talk to a few more but Paul is figuring since our house is the newest on the block that when they tied into the sanitary connection to the main line ours happen to possibly be at lower percent of grade to our house (flatter) and this is why it possibly happen. OR the connection from our line to the main line.

We will be talking to the City AND the Contractor to see what the heck! I apologize for any typos, etc. but I am TIRED.......