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Second Day After

Sunday 29 September 2024

The second day after the devastation of Helene was for me a day of cleaning again. Yesterday I’d started making piles of brush throughout the backyard. Today, I moved it all to the street. I left a couple of piles because they were primarily old wood (as opposed to the mostly-green wood I took out to the street) because I thought we might be able to make an ognisko from it all — or several, in point of fact.

But the most important event of the day was that we were finally able to get in touch with Ciocia M and her daughter C (essentially K’s sister and L’s cousin) in Asheville, a town which had received about the worst of the flooding here in the southeast. Two rivers run though Asheville, and they of course both flooaded. The Swannanoa River swelled to 27 feet above its normal level, wiping out the road that leads to M’s home.

We’d been trying to get in touch with M since yesterday, but we’d had no luck. We finally got to talk to her today, and our message was clear: if you can get out safely (which, from our research, seemed entirely do-able), get down here now. So M and C packed up some of the food in their fridge, put the cat in the cat carrier, and headed down.

Shortly after she arrived, A, another of K’s Polish sisters, arrived.

“Can we get you anything?” K asked.

“Tea,” A said, without hesitation. Her family has been without power since Friday, and a Polish woman who’s lived without hot tea for that long has one thing on her mind. But K, being Polish herself, had other things on her mind: “Of course, you’re staying for dinner, right?”

Soon, A’s husband P called. “Come for dinner!” we said, not making it a request or an option but rather a requirement. A demand, even.

P arrived and it was soon like all the Christmases and Easters our three families have spent together. P and I had a couple of beers and some laughs; the ladies had white wine and some laughs — hopefully everyone felt better when it was all said and done.

It’s a strange feeling having a mini-party in the midst of all this misery and devastation. The images coming out of the area where I grew up, for example, show the far-reaching effects of super-charged Helene. People have lost their homes, and some have lost their lives. But we have to be grateful for what we have, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge us for some relaxing laughs that set everyone’s spirits a bit at ease.

After P and A left, we took Ciocia M to the living room and taught her to play golf on the Switch. And thus we ended our first night together.

The question — the concern — haunting M’s thoughts is simple: how long will they have to stay with us? They’re welcome to stay as long as necessary, but that’s not really the issue. How long will conditions keep them out of their home?

Asheville is bad: Greenville is heavily damaged, but Asheville is simply wrecked. “It’s like the apocalypse,” M said. Water lines are broken; power lines are down everywhere; the winds blew down countless trees; rivers have deposited tons of mud on all the streets; flood waters have swept away buildings and cars then totaled buildings they left behind. It will take months to get everything back to some semblance of normal.

And for C? Her senior year is now thrown into doubt. How will they possibly be able to go to school? How will they make up the lost time?

These are of course questions no one can answer. All the steps ahead of everyone working on the recovery effort: before power can be restored, the damaged lines and poles must be accessible. This means the fallen trees have to go. But can the crews get to all the trees given the bog that Asheville has turned into? So many pieces to coordinate. And this is happening in communities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

The commentators are right: this is our Katrina,

Helene

Friday 27 September 2024

It was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm. We’ve heard that before. Ivan was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm, and by the time it reached us, it was some light wind and a bit of rain. So we were probably all a bit skeptical about what would happen when Helene rolled through.

As with Ivan, we canceled school (rather, it was an “e-learning day,” which means little work in a practical sense). I thought it would be a relatively easy day with few stresses.

And then Helene rolled through: winds up to 70 miles per hour. Eight inches of rain in our city. It was, in short, a disaster. There are trees down by the thousands throughout the city.

The adventure began last night: I stayed up to make sure the rain was not getting too heavy and flooding our basement. I kept checking our sump pump in the crawl space, and every time I looked, it was dry.

“Maybe we’ll make it,” I thought.

This morning K got up early for work and when she saw the basement was still dry, she did some yoga, ate some breakfast, and checked the basement one last time. That’s when she came to wake me up. Surely she envisioned the normal routine: shop vacs going like mad in a desperate but ultimately doomed effort to keep ahead of the flood. That’s surely what she was thinking as she came to wake me up.

And then the power went out.

We spent most of this morning, as a result, trying to get water out of our basement with towels, buckets, and brooms. We worked for hours and seemed to get nowhere. The water in the backyard continued to rise, reaching its highest level ever: a good bit over our trampoline. Still we fought. Eventually, the rain slowed and then stopped, the water went down in the backyard, but we still had water coming into the basement. Around eleven this morning that finally stopped, too.

We went out for a ride to see if anything was open and to see how the town looked. Not good.

Especially Conestee Dam. Conestee is our favorite local park, but it has a dark side: the dam that makes the lake (though now it’s more a swamp with the sediment that has gathered there over the decades) holds back untold tons of toxic waste that textile mills upstream dumped into the Ready River a century ago.

The century-old dam’s structural integrity has been a topic of much discussion locally and in the state capital, and the powers that be have finally taken the first steps to solving the problem. But when I saw what was happening there today, I feared it might be too late.

In the early evening, we saw power company trucks working on our street, and within a few minutes, we had power again. But it’s spotty: the houses on the street that intersects ours are still without power. In the neighborhoods around us, some streets have power and others do not.

Other areas have gotten it worse, though. Asheville, where we used to live and where Cocia M and her daughters live (although the oldest now lives in Charlotte during the school year) got pounded:

Flood 2023

Tuesday 9 May 2023

We had a tremendous hail and rain storm today — about the worst we’ve ever had.

Flood

Monday 7 June 2021

 

Day 70: Flood

Sunday 24 May 2020

It started raining around two this afternoon, first sporadic rain with fat, lazy drops, then steady rain, then torrential rain.

In the past, such rain worried me because of flooding in our basement. With the leak in our roof, I now have different concerns. As the storm grew and the wind blew harder, I wonder whether or not I’d secured the two tarps protecting our roof well enough to keep them in place with such a storm. There was really nothing I could do about it at the time, of course: it would not have been remotely safe to head onto the roof in a storm to put down additional weight to keep the tarps from flying off.

In the end, my worries were for nothing: the tarps stayed in place; the sump basin didn’t even have much water in it, so the basement wasn’t even close to being threatened.

Yet we still had a lake in our backyard: the creek didn’t crest but we had essentially one big puddle in the lowest part of our yard, so after we finished playing a game (“Ticket to Ride” — I never play to win; I play to block other players — you can’t lose if you’re not trying to win!), E and I struck out to see what was going on in the neighborhood.

We weren’t prepared for what we found:

To begin with, there is a house basically in a hole that has an enormous backyard — I thought it was a park when we first moved here.

The road that goes by it was closed because their yard, which is in reality just a drainage basin for the surrounding community, was completely flooded.

Completely.

So much so that the culvert under the road was completely submerged, creating a whirlpool as the water tried to drain.

We stood in the road looking at the whirlpool, right at the edge of the water. We’re past the time of E asking questions like, “Daddy, what would happen if I fell in that water?” He knows. He likes to show he knows. “Boy, Daddy, if I fell in that…” and his voice trailed off for effect.

It gave me a little shudder, the shudder of a parent having nightmarish visions of the worst possible outcome. Once such thoughts enter my mind, it’s hard to shake them. The Boy seemed to realize that. “Come on, Daddy, let’s go back to the other side.

All that water — undoubtedly the worst flooding we’ve seen there. It was still nothing compared to what we saw later, downstream. We walk by here almost every night — it’s K’s favorite walk.

The creek that was forming the whirlpool earlier joins with another creek at this point, and the two completely covered the flat land around it.

We headed back home, still having fun on the way.

In the evening, we went for a walk to show the girls what it looked like. Of course, most of the water had subsided, but there was still enough to be impressive, and just enough to enjoy safely.

The Flood of 2020: Aftermath

Friday 7 February 2020

Today we got to see what the county looked like while the rain poured yesterday. It was pretty much as you might expect.

We also go to see what damage the food did to our backyard. It was pretty much as you might expect.

I was on my way to school when K called to say that school had in fact been canceled, so returning, I stopped by our favorite park to see how the dam looked. It was pretty much as you might expect.

Finally, I searched for video footage of what people were experiencing in the county and Google delivered to me a couple of videos of what people have done in previous floods in the area.

It was pretty much as you might expect.

The Flood of 2020

Thursday 6 February 2020

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

Water

Monday 5 October 2015

The key is to keep things in the proper perspective, as it is with most things in life. We just came out of a mini-drought, with very little rain at all for weeks, and the rain of the last week has replenished our water supply.

As the forecast worsened, I was confident. I’d just redone our basement work space that had flooded twice before, putting heavy-duty waterproof paint on the floor and up to the ground line and sealing the previously-unsealed holes in the concrete that were evidence of some previous owner’s battle with termites. We were ready with a pump in case it did flood. I’d redone the draining system, the failure of which had caused the first two floods. We were ready.

Sunday morning, though, we found water in the basement. Not much, but a bit. By the time I had gone back upstairs to change into more appropriate attire and had returned, there was noticeably more water. Significantly more water. I scanned for the source, but it didn’t seem to be coming from corner that was the usual source. I soon discovered the breach: one of the termite-poison-injection points had been compromised: water was literally bubbling out of the small hole as if it were a spring. I plugged it with a wine cork and set up the pump, only to discover that the two or so inches of water was not enough to trigger the pump. No fear: we had plenty more water in the crawl space and a shop vac. In the end, I pumped probably seven or eighth hundred or so gallons out of the crawl space at about two hundred gallons out of the work room.

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The nicely-painted floor, though, was a wreck. But the overall damage was minimal, and the situation could have been much worse:

  • We had power.
  • We had a working pump to empty the crawl space.
  • We had a working shop vac to suck up the water that’s too shallow for the pump to draw up, which was basically all the water in the basement — but still.
  • Even if it totally flooded the basement, nothing down there was critical to daily living or irreplaceable.
  • The living area living of our house was highly unlikely ever to flood at all.

By the time we got the basement situation under control, the only real concern was the forest in the backyard. With such saturated ground and such relatively strong winds, everyone was saying that the compromised root systems of trees wouldn’t hold indefinitely. But they all held, and we escaped with no damage to speak of.

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Throughout the day, the routine was the same:

  • Grade some papers.
  • Check the water level in the basement.
  • Hang out with the kids a while.
  • Repeat.

We all knew that the situation was worse the closer one got to the shore. When the pictures of the damage started appearing on the Internet, though, it was far beyond anything we’d expected.

So today, we went about our normal routines, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thankful for the ability to go to work this Monday morning.

Flood 2014

Friday 1 August 2014

The Boy woke up this morning at four. Well, that’s what time it was when I finally looked at the clock. We finally got him calmed back down, we were back in bed, and the thought occurred to me: “It’s still raining.” It had gushed all day, with enough of a deluge in the morning that the drainage creek at the back of our backyard had overrun its banks again. Not nearly as badly as last year, but still a substantial amount of water.

“There goes our mulch,” I said, but it miraculously survived.

The basement was another story. It has flooded before, but K and I were hopeful, with all the dry weather we’d been having, that we wouldn’t have that problem. At four, I thought, “Better go check the basement.”

Probably three inches of water in the storage room. The crawl space was worse.

Lowes opens at six; I was there shortly after six. By around six forty, the newly-purchased pump, which pumps up to twenty-six gallons a minute, was at work.

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Two hours later, it was still sending water gushing out.

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Another hour later, it was a trickle but still going. So if we had an average of ten gallons of water a minute (a very conservative estimate, I think), that would be 600 gallons of water an hour. At three hours, that would be close to two thousand gallons. Is that possible? Two thousand gallons in the crawl space alone? It doesn’t seem possible.

But after looking at what happened in Amherstburg, Ontario, I realize how fortunate we were.

Surveying the Damage

Friday 7 June 2013

We head down to our once-lake-front and take a look at what thousands of gallons of water flowing over a small area in a few minutes can do.

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Mud, sand, limbs, leaves, cans — this is what it looks like after a flood.

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Plants destroyed, swings caked in muck, belongings strewn through neighbors’ yards. I can only imagine what a real flood would be like.

We go out into the neighborhood, checking on what gifts others received, eventually heading over a couple of streets to a house we’d looked at when we were house hunting. It had been love at first sight. The yard was magnificent; the kitchen/dining area was open yet homey, almost cozy, with a fireplace in the corner. The full basement was finished on one half that opened out to a fenced dog run. Yet a friend advised against it: too much cracking in the foundation walls. “It won’t be a problem now,” he said, “but in a few years, it will cost some significant money to fix.”

We were heartbroken.

As we walk through the neighborhood, I remember that on the other side of the dog run was a small creek — a draining stream just like the one that runs behind our house, and so we head over to see. I couldn’t remember how much elevation there was between the drain and the house.

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Not enough.

Talking to neighbors across the street who were out in the yard, we learned that the owners had well over a foot of water in their basement, and that the water had risen to just below the bottom of the window on the outside. I suddenly became very thankful for the two or three inches we found welling up through the slab in our basement.

Flood

Wednesday 5 June 2013

It started around five. I called K to see if she’d need to stay late at work and asked her if it was raining.

“It’s coming down pretty hard here,” I explained.

And down it came, through dinner, through clean up time, into play time. E and I were by the window when I realized how significant the rainfall really was.

Sheets of rain; gusts of wind. I had these terrible images of one of the enormous trees in the backyard falling onto the house. What would we do? How could I protect my children, my wife?

And still it came down.

Looking into the backyard, I saw we had a lake. And it was growing. Within a few minutes, I realized why: the stream was no longer a stream. And within a few more minutes, we were all standing in the carport in shock.

But it was nothing compared to what I saw when I got to the neighbor’s yard. Looking into her neighbor’s yard, I saw something that literally made be question my grasp on reality. Water flowing out of the house. Pouring. Torrents running out of the house.

The poor folks were getting it from three directions.

Seeing the owner in the garage, I walked in and asked him if he needed help. I could only imagine what might be going on inside the house, and I thought if I could help him move anything at all to higher ground it would be more useful than standing around with a video camera in my hand.

Fortunately, at that point, nothing had gotten into the house. It was just flowing through his garage, he explained. He’d lived in the neighborhood for close to forty years, he explained, and he’d never seen anything remotely close to this.

I promised to return later to see if the situation had worsened and if he needed help.

It turned out, though, that we had our own issues to deal with.

“Where did the water come from?” K asked. Walls? Floor? Who knows. When this much rain falls in such a short time, the answer is probably, “All of the above.”

I vacuumed for at least half an hour before I really felt I was making no progress at all.

“Surely I’m just imagining this,” I muttered to myself. “Surely I’m making progress. I’ve emptied this thing at least ten or twelve times, and it supposedly holds sixteen gallons. That’s a lot of water for it to show no change,” I continued, still rambling to myself. (The more confused I am, the more likely I am to begin talking aloud to myself. Perhaps I’m not the only one?)

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I decided to take a quick break and see if the water rose any. That would confirm my obvious suspicion that water was still flooding into the house.

By this time, though, the rain had almost stopped and the water was lower, almost returning to the confines of the small creek.

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What remained was a fetid mess.

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An expensive fetid mess: the house, about a half a mile away from our humble home, with a backyard so gloriously landscaped I thought it was a park, no longer had a beautiful garden. In its stead was a lake.

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It was no Katrina. Flash flooding at the most. Still, enough of a view of what water can do to put famous floods into a more meaningful perspective.