Our Flood

This past week we got A LOT of rain! Really early Tuesday morning it started to pour and it didn't stop until about 10:30 or 11:00 that day. They said on the news that we got 5 inches of rain in 5 hours. We had a little flood at our house and some water in our basement, but were really lucky and didn't have too much damage. There were a lot of people here that weren't that lucky, so we are grateful. Here are some pics of our side yard and the street in front of our house. These were taken after the rain had finally stopped and the water had gone down quite a bit.

The water took our fence down (bent the poles).


This van at one point had water at least up to it's taillights

This is our side yard. If you look at the bottom right you will see Levi's tomato plans braving the flood. Surprisingly, they survived.

Here is my whole story. Not that exciting to read, but I wanted it for my journal.

So, Tuesday morning I got up and went to the basement to get our sump pump going. Then I came up stairs and looked outside, no big deal. About 9:30 I heard some noise outside and looked out my front window and there was a city bus trying to charge through a few feet of water in the street and I looked a little further down the road and saw two cars stranded in water. The water was still out in the street so I went and did a couple things and about 9:45 I looked out the window again and I couldn't see my front lawn. Water was rushing toward our house and it was deep! I started freaking out (I wish I could have seen myself doing this, I'm sure it was HILARIOUS, although not as entertaining as Dora because my girls weren't phased). I knew that water would be coming in our basement somewhere, so I went down and started moving anything important to a higher spot. I looked at one of our basement windows and the water was about a foot higher than the bottom, which meant it was 1 1/2 feet deep outside in our carport. It was pouring through every crack it could find in the window. I
got a broom and started pushing water toward the drain in the floor. Luckily the giant pile of empty cardboard boxes from when we moved a year ago sopped up a lot of the water and saved a lot of stuff from getting damaged. I had been bugging Levi to get rid of those "fire hazard" boxes for a while, but he must have been inspired to leave them. :)

After a while the rain slowed down and I went outside. There were three cars in the water up to their taillights, our fence was down, and water was just rushing through our yard down into our neighbor's. It sounded like a river. I went and swept more water in the basement for a while. After the rain completely stopped, I got my camera and took some pictures. The water had already gone down a lot by this time. Everything that wasn't really heavy or nailed down had been swept to the back of our carport or against our bushes. Levi's small vegetable garden had taken a beating. It washed our neighbor's large garden away completely. Erosion has left a giant hole in the corner of our yard. Honestly, that damage wasn't as bad as I had thought it could be. My flowers survived, Levi's garden mostly survived, and it took us about 2 hours to get our basement cleaned up. Not too bad, but it was a little scary experience for me to be home by myself with my girls and to see such a large amount of water surrounding my house.