Drying out…
The carpet fan is whirring away in the background, and I think we dodged the bullet on this one, at least as far as It Could Have Been Worse. The major damage that isn’t replaceable is a small stack of papers I’d set aside for scanning, which were on the floor in my office. I’m thinking that I’m going to try to dry the wet papers that are irreplaceable (mostly my mother’s old columns from the Findlay Times, since defunct) and if they don’t scan, I’ll get a voice-to-text program and read the things into it. I’ve tried scanning some tonight, and the results were not terribly good. Too much bleed through in the pulp paper of the print from the other side.
The situation was that it rained a LOT after a heavy snowfall, with subzero temperatures in between. During the rain, the temperatures went up to over 60 F, and the frozen ground (and snow and ice) melted. So we got a lot of water very suddenly - between 8 am and 11 am Saturday morning, the sump under the house rapidly filled, and the float on the sump pump tangled and didn’t pump out the inrush.
Susan bought an outside pump for the low area in our back yard, and that decreased the water burden somewhat - as the water collected back there and working its way into the sump now was pumped around the house and into our driveway. But the damage was done; we had the whole north wall of the basement library leaking like a sieve, and soaking our built-in carpet in the basement. In my office and the laundry room, there was up to a half-inch of water covering the floor in spots.
So with the pumps working and dumping the water Somewhere Outside The House safely, our situation turned to getting the basement furniture out of the way and drying out the carpet and pad. Today, Monday night, three days later, the wet spots in the pad and carpet are just about totally bone dry, and I’m finishing up the cleanup of wet laundry and whatnot. The main expense was the new pump and the fan rental, and the rest was mostly time and effort with shoving around equipment, carpet and furniture.
With the new pump outside, we can get onto a developing situation better in the future; what we now need to do is to buy a better sump pump with a battery backup that won’t get stuck in a inactive status.