Sentinel_070821

Well now, I woke up on Monday, prepared to go out among them, and seek new leads in the job market at a nearby job fair. There had been rain, our first here since July 3, promised for Sunday night. I watched the radar on the local KY3 Internet site and when the radar showed the rainfall right overhead, I looked out the window and saw nothing at all. I finally fell asleep waiting for the rain. About 3 in the morning I woke up to a lightening flash outside so I pulled out the telephone line to my computer, but there was still no rain here. I rose out of bed at 8:30 to get ready for the job fair, but first went downstairs to make a cup of coffee. There was a major tropical storm outside my dining room window! I met Joyce in the kitchen; she was putting down a towel to absorb the water leaking in through upstairs leak I had hoped was fixed last fall. It takes the right combination of wind and rain to make the rain leak in and this storm had wind and rain coming from all directions, so the water was pouring in. We had water pouring in from places we’ve never had leaks.
I went down into the basement to get something, I forgot what, only to find we had flooding going on in the basement. We had so much rain coming down that it had filled the door well on the North side of the house and the water was bursting through the doorjamb like a ruptured dam! The water was rising quickly and I wanted to disconnect the electric from the washer and dryer, so I took my wooden stepladder and used it like a bridge to get to the appliances and pull the plugs on them. It was surreal, there were laundry baskets floating on the pond, a cardboard box, and unbelievably, a terracotta clay overflow dish from an unused planter had started out like a ship on the ocean.
I saw another river flowing from the South side of the house so I went to investigate its source. It was surprising to me that the source was a PVC pipe that serves as a conduit for the electric that runs to the old light pole out in the yard. It looked like a ¾ inch water pipe with no faucet to turn off the water flow. We have been in this house for 18 years now and I had never seen even a damp spot where that pipe runs back into the basement. I had to call Joyce down into the basement so she could see it for herself. I repositioned the ladder and used it to get to the electric distribution panel so I could throw the breaker to the outside electric. There had been so much rain here (5.3 inches in less than 5 hours) that the water table had risen and saturated the ground enough to send water down the pipe like it was a natural spring!
Just as I contemplated what I needed to do to save the other things in the basement, the rain finally stopped and the spring went dry, the dam buster outside the back door started to recede and all we needed was to set a plan to cleanup. We have had some rainy times during the last 20 years here, but nothing like Monday. The city of Springfield broke a single day record with 2.9 inches of water on Monday, we had 5.3 inches here, and Walnut Grove, just 8 miles away, had 12 inches of rainfall in those 5 hours. Record breaking rains fell all around us. It’s lucky that we live at the top of a hill.
The good news is we got another step up on our campaign to really clean the basement. The bad news is my repair last fall didn’t fix the window leak. I’ve battled that thing for years now. It just hides for months, even years at a time between that just right combination of wind and rain. Ah the joys of home ownership are immense.
Bill