Deluge 2010, or who put this pool in our basement?

We had a rainy weekend over March 13th and 14th. James checked our basement for water Monday morning at 5:30 a.m. and it was dry.

I went down at 8:30 a.m. and found this!

I started by sending out e-mail and Facebook requests for wet vacs and pumps. It just so happens that so many other people in Massachusetts had flooded, that neither wet vacs nor pumps were available for rental or purchase.

The Baxters brought us their wet vac right away. We started with it, still trying to figure out where the water was coming in from. They also took Lachlan back home with them and brought us dinner that night! How nice was that?

Kevin Bowring brought over his wet vac and worked for some time in the basement with us. Most impressive was the fact that he had water in his own basement, but because ours was worse, he came over to help us.

Two good friends offered to drive to New Hampshire to buy pumps for us. We were able to borrow two pumps and took one of our friends up on her offer to drive an hour away to get a pump.

As those friends and I were carrying things upstairs, I picked up two soggy boxes of pasta from the food storage and they completely disintegrated in my hands. It was pretty funny to see water filled with floating rotini.

Our bishop stopped by to assess our situation and he brought us the 3rd pump. He spent a lot of time that week helping flooded members. He's a wonder at rigging up spare parts into workable pumps.

Two of our friends, Elisabeth Christensen and Jessica Welles stayed the rest of the day after they brought pumps and waded through our basement with us, to rescue things and haul it all upstairs and dry it out.

This is the view into the toy closet and past it to James' office. While we weren't too sad about the main basement carpet getting ruined, we were pretty sad about James' office carpet getting ruined. It was fairly new carpet.

We finally figured out where the water was coming from--and it wasn't one little hole or location. The water was bubbling in through the place where the wall meets the floor on the foundations on THREE sides of the house.

James was storing a lot of stuff on his office floor which got totally ruined. Included in that were family videos, important photos, documents and certificates, etc.

Why all this water? The weekend rainstorm had taken the Charles River to an all-time high. It had never gotten this high in the 70 years they've been keeping records. On Monday it was still 2 feet above flood zone.

This is James bailing out the basement Monday night. We took turns staying up all night long to keep bailing water off the floor and into this bin for the sump pump to work. We naively thought we'd be able to clean it all up in one day. The water kept coming in for days and days.

We got smarter on Tuesday. We both started wearing galoshes (that water was ice cold).

It took 3 pumps running full time to keep up with the water flowing in. Our utility sink could hardly keep up with all of the hoses draining into it.

James had another "smart idea" that tried on Tuesday morning. He bought a 50 foot hose and hooked it from the sump pump out the dryer vent into our back yard, so that we didn't have to wait for the utility sink to drain.

Here is a pump we borrowed from the Holts.

Thanks to the 3 pumps running full time, the water level never got higher than 4 inches. If we'd not spent days and nights bailing, it would have been 4 feet high throughout the basement.

Our fire department in our town, Needham pumped out 200 homes, and had 1000 more calls for people asking for their help. That only includes people who called the fire department because they thought their flood levels were dangerously high for the power, gas, oil, etc.

Here is another pump we borrowed from the Lunds. We had 3 pumps running nonstop for 60 hours which means that we pumped (conservative estimate) 30,000 gallons of water out of our basement.

The water table was so high that it took days once the rain had stopped for the extra water to disgorge to the Charles River.

There were only 4 homes on our street that didn't get flooded. And the flood was completely non-discriminatory--didn't matter if you had an old house, a new house, a sealed basement, a french drain system. None of those things necessarily made you immune.

James ended up spending a lot of time on Tuesday helping at one neighbor's house who had 15 inches of water in their newly finished basement!

The view out the cellar door. It was nice to look outside and see the bright sunshine despite the dark, dank wetness of the basement.