Flood!
We had something like 6" of rain in a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and the city drainage system apparently couldn’t handle it. The streets in front of my house had almost 2 feet of water in them. The lower level of my place is bedroom/bathroom/laundry room. In under an hour over 3 feet of water poured in. My bed was literally floating across the room, 3 bookcases of paperbacks were under water, furniture was collapsing, the stacked washer/dryer tipped over....disaster.
Jack and I were both stressing, obviously. My landlord had an industrial pump over here right away, and in about 3 hours most of the water was pumped out. He had a crew here at 8 am, and they’ve been working all day on the clean up. The water is gone, the industrial humidifiers are just being set up now and he’ll have the ozone guys come in to prevent mold formation. He's going to have to completely gut the lower level, but he got lucky - the furnace was underwater and still works! The washer and dryer are working as well. We have hot water. My clothes got wet, but they can be cleaned. I lost some craft supplies and some paperback books and my boxspring/mattress.
Poor Jack...when he's stressed or scared he likes to hide under the bed so he kept going to the top of the stairs and looking down into the bedroom. He couldn't even go outside to pee because the yard was under water and he hates to get wet. Fortunately, his beds, most of his toys and really all of the important things are upstairs.
We'll be fine; things can be replaced. The bathroom is functioning, the electricity didn’t go out and we have clean water. It's just going to be inconvenient for awhile, until the renovations happen. The landlord offered to move me to a hotel or another property (he doesn’t have any vacant ones right now), but it’s a lot easier for me with Jack if we can just stay here, at least for most of it so that’s probably what we’ll do. Ugh...what a day!
Here’s the front page news story from my city newspaper: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/scn-sa-flood1oct12,0,3558158.story?coll=stam-top-headlines
Here's my bedroom under water. The bed is actually floating in this picture. The water got a little higher before it stopped, but not too much:
Here's the laundry/storage room after the water was pumped out:
The high water mark on my bedroom wall after the water was pumped out:
The boiler was almost totally submerged; you can see the water mark to the right of the hot water tank. Amazing that it still worked! The oil company came out and checked it to make sure it was ok, and only had to replace a little switch:
The landlord's crew did an amazing job cleaning it up. Other than sleeping on the couch and having to wash all of my clothes (and find a place to put them temporarily - I have WAY too many clothes), it's not nearly as inconvenient as I expected. I'll take some stuff to the laundromat tomorrow, but the washer and dryer here are working, so I can putter away at getting everything washed from home for the most part. Oh, and the dry cleaner is going to make a LOT of money with all my coats, suits, etc that will have to be cleaned. Still, it could have been so much worse.
One last picture..this is Jack tonight, exhausted after supervising all the work today:
Now I'm going to make him move, because I'm heading there to sleep in a few minutes. It's been a LONG couple of days, and the weekend promises to be more of the same.