Rain and Floods

We had an amazing rain storm the weekend of the the 14th of March. It rained and rained, and the rivers started to flood and spill over onto major highways. We made it home from church before they shut down Highway 3A at the Shawsheen River, about a mile from our house. The rain cleared on Monday and the sun came out, and by Tuesday the road was re-opened as the river had gone down considerably. There is a wide meadow around the river at 3A, and it was a lake instead of a meadow when I walked up to see what was going on.

I took some pictures of the meadow because it was so amazing that there was so much water. The news was reporting that the weekend storm had been a hundred-year storm - that they hadn't had that much rain for many years.




















We felt pretty glad that there had only been a small amount of water in one corner of our basement through all this. Robert left town for business, and I got up Wednesday morning, went downstairs to check my email, and then came up for breakfast. After breakfast I went down to work, and was horrified to discover that I had a lake in our family room. The water was silver on top of the carpet and was about 3 or 4 inches deep, considering the height of the pad and carpet. I started using our wet/dry vacuum to suck up the water, thinking that this was just a temporary problem. Four hours later I was calling people for help, and thank goodness many of our family and friends showed up to help, because it was hard going. It was bad enough using the vacuum to pull the water out of the carpet, but in addition we had to repeatedly carry the 15 gallon tank up 6 stairs out the bulkhead and out to the street so that we could dump it into the storm sewer.

After a couple of days of this, we started to realize that this wasn't going away any time soon and that we needed to come up with some way of dealing with this over the long term. With the help of friends, we moved furniture and pulled up carpet and pad out of half the room and hauled it outside. Another friend brought over his surface pump (I never even knew that such a thing as a surface pump existed!) so that we could put the pump into the vacuum tank and suck the water up and out to the street through a hose. We were able to see that the water was coming in where the floor met the wall. We set up the vacuums and some sand bags in an effort to keep ahead of the water.




















After all this hard work and trauma, we were assisted by our friends Barry and Jim, who suggested putting in a sump pump and carving a channel in the concrete so that the water would be directed to the sump and then get pumped up and out. We agreed, and they set to work on the project of chipping out a hole for the pump and using a concrete saw to cut the channel. Once this was working, we were able to let the pump do the hard work of getting the water out, which was a big relief. Here is a picture of our pump plus the chaos of the furniture stacked up and out of the way. The long strips of white are the baseboard that they pulled off the wall so that they could carve the channel.














With the pump working and water leaving the house, we could finally sleep again instead of taking 4 hour shifts removing water. We were quite relieved, and then... the next weekend we had a "30-year" storm. Unfortunately the ground was so saturated that the water had no place to go but inside our basement some more. This time it was coming in the back of the house as well as on the sides, and after we removed the rest of the carpet, discovered that it was spurting up through small cracks in the floor. We now had a 4-5 inch deep lake that filled the furnace room as well as the family room. Luckily the people who remodeled our house before we bought it had put the furnace and the water heater up on bricks, so they were not damaged. Unluckily, we discovered that there had probably been a sump pump in the family room that they had removed and covered over. Our friend Barry helped us again, and carved another channel with his cement saw and installed another sump pump at the back of the house to catch that water. He also suggested that we cease and desist vacuuming the water until it was around 4" deep, which was an excellent suggestion, because by this point we were so exhausted that we couldn't think straight.

I took a short movie of one of our bubbling fountains in the middle of the floor. It's not too good, but maybe you can get a sense of the power of water pressure outside and under our foundation.









It took about 3 more weeks for the water to dry up totally. Hearing the sump pumps do their cycling was such a happy noise. For the uninitiated, the pumps have a float on them, sort of like the float in a toilet. When the water gets to a certain level, the pump activates. As the pump works, the float sinks to a lower level, eventually turning it off until the next time. Hearing the pump during the night meant that I could be in my bed instead of downstairs fighting the water.

At some point during this time we moved as much of the furniture as we could out of the basement and into the upstairs. We also were able to put the ruined carpet out for the trash pickup. And no, unfortunately, none of this was covered by insurance.















In retrospect, we were lucky that our furnace and water heater weren't damaged. We were assisted by some good people who donated their time and expertise to help us out and to teach us about our options and the best way to proceed. In the grand scheme of things, a flooded basement certainly isn't the worst trial to endure, but all in all it has been quite an experience. I don't address how we are fixing things yet - I'll post that information next time.