We knew the storm was coming: the forecast for our area was around two inches. “That’s enough to flood our basement if it comes fast enough,” I thought.
When I left for work, it wasn’t raining; when I got to work, it was. Still, I thought we might be able to squeak through without much harm.
K took L to the doctor in the morning and then went back to the house before heading to work. She texted me at 10:36: “I’m back home. I am working from home today. It looks pretty bad. I’m going to keep an eye on the basement.”
At 10:42, she sent me another text: “I just saw the sump pump turn on and pump out a little bit of water. There is a little water under the plastic [vapor barrier in the crawl space]. It doesn’t look good for today.”
She sent me a picture a minute later:
“Oh, there’s no way we’re going to escape a flooded basement,” I thought. Still, it’s usually no big deal: we work for a couple of hours with a shop-vac and everything’s fine.
“Those hammocks will get destroyed,” I replied. Then ten minutes later at 10:54, I text: “Can you see water going into the pump basin? A trickle from the basement side perhaps?”
At 11:04 she sent me another picture.
And then two minutes later, at 11:06, the next text from K: “The basement is flooding.”
The trouble was, I couldn’t just dash away. We at school were having our own adventure: not a drill but an actual shelter-in-place reality. Three hundred eighth graders huddled against the wall in the corridor for almost forty minutes.
At 11:25, I texted our neighbor: “You guys flooding?”
“Creeks are bad…house is fine,” he responded. With pictures.
“K said we’re flooding,” I texted. “I’m stuck here because we’re in a tornado lockdown.”
“Want me to go help her?” he immediately replied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be exhibit 344,038 for the argument that he is the best neighbor one could have.
Finally, when we had everything under control at the school and the kids fed and watered, I got a text from K at 12:35: “I have been pumping for an hour and a half now. G[, our neighbor,] is here to help. I think you should come home as soon as possible. The rain is not going to stop and water is coming in like through a faucet.”
I went to the cafeteria and found the eighth-grade administrator. “My wife just said that our basement is flooding. I’m heading home. Someone’s going to have to cover my last three classes.”
“Go,” he said.
I went to the front office, where the sixth-grade administrator was talking to the receptionist. “My wife just said that our basement is flooding,” I began. “And you need coverage,” the receptionist said. “On it.”
“Go,” said both the administrator and receptionist.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, along with the calm way they implemented the tornado shelter-in-place lockdown would be exhibit 344,038 for the argument that our school faculty knows how to work an emergency.
“Water is coming through the termite treatment holes,” K texted me on the way home. A few years I’d dug out the “filler compound” with which whoever did that patched the wholes. The material crumbled under the lightest touch of a screwdriver blade. I had cleaned out all the holes on the out-facing walls and patched them. “Guess I didn’t do a good job,” it thought, stopping at the hardware store on the way home to buy some rubber plugs for the holes.
But this water was coming from holes in the inner basement walls — where I hadn’t touched any of the holes. “What can possibly happen here?” I thought.
A lot.
The water was jetting out of the holes, making little fountains just about two to three inches high — that’s how much hydrostatic pressure had built up under our house. We plugged the holes, moved some shelves and found more fountains, plugged those, and vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.
It was a first: both rooms of our half-basement were flooding. And so we vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.
K went to get the kids. I stayed behind and vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.
We finally got everything under control around dinner time. At 5:48, I texted our selfless neighbor, “I can only just now say that I think we’ve got both rooms completely under control.”
And now, at 9:46, I hear the sump pump kick in for about the tenth time since I began writing this, so I guess it’s about time to head downstairs and see if it’s flooding again — it’s not supposed to stop raining until after midnight…
But we’re not the only ones on our street, or even the worst off. And this flood seems to have enveloped much of the South itself.
At one point in the evening, shortly after dinner, the power flicked off and stayed disconnected for a good fifteen seconds — long enough that I’d started running options through my head. When the lights came back on, K and I looked at each other, thinking about all the reports of downed trees and power lines, realizing just how much worse it could have been.
We had it worse than we’ve ever had it, but we could have had it worse still.
Previous Floods
Flood 2018
Water
Flood 2014
Flood