I've always liked the rain, so when the heavens opened last Sunday afternoon it was with a feeling of childish wonder that I watched the rain reach torrential levels. I felt safe in our sturdy old house, built far up a steep hill away from any potential watercourse flooding. After a while I noticed that the neighbouring gravel car park was starting to fill up with water, which was pretty unusual. But then the nearby buildings had recently had some work done on their guttering so I thought perhaps something had been left unfinished and the roofs were voiding rainwater into the car park. I even started taking a video out the window, and in the video you can hear me remarking to DH: "Look, there's even a wheelie bin floating around now!".
Then DS on a lower floor called out "Mom, our garden path is starting to flood..." so I went down to look at that. Which is when we realised that the 'lake' in the car park had breached our fence and was now rushing straight into our garden.
We all went running down to our garden-level floor, which we call the basement but as our house is built into a slope, the garden door opens directly at ground level. DH called out "we're getting water coming in here". We ran and grabbed any available towels and threw them down in front of the door, and I grabbed some bricks that we had in the utility room and piled them on the towels. Meanwhile in those few short minutes, the garden had filled with water, reaching a level which I later measured to be 15 inches high to the tidemark. The water was a rushing river, gushing in from the car park side to hit the back of our house, then streaming to the right where it flooded our shed and presumably swirled around until it could fall down into the storm drains.
Have you ever had a nightmare where you suddenly have a few minutes to decide what to save? Faced with a potential 15 inches of water in the house at any minute, that's where we were. Water was already flowing steadily into the house through the air bricks and crevices around pipework, flooding the utility room and downstairs loo with up to three inches of water and rushing into the void beneath the wooden floor of my sewing room. We turned off all the power, rescued the cat food and shut the cat in an upstairs room for safety, shoved the treadmill up onto paintcans out of the water, then started evacuating the sewing room (in the dark). DS called the Fire Department to report the flooding but was told they had multiple reports from all over town so would get to us when they could. The boys worked tirelessly to run all five of my machines (three of which had been stored on the floor) upstairs to safety, then everything else that I thrust into their hands such as photo albums, completed quilts, electrical appliances, my quilt frame...meanwhile I was working like a maniac to pull everything else off lower shelves and cupboards and piling it on tables and my ironing surface. Once everything of higher priority was off the ground, I grabbed my shelf of 'waste' fabric (sheeting, old curtains etc.) and threw it down in the doorway onto the creeping lake of water coming into the sewing room from the nearby external door, to create a dam.
The evacuation zone
At the same time we built a heavier 'dam' further along the corridor, grabbing out some bags of horticultural grit that we had stored in the 'cellar' portion of the ground floor and using them like sandbags. By now the water was pouring steadily into the corridor but thankfully hitting that dam and diverting into the utility room instead. I ran into the dollhouse room and started moving anything lower down to safety on higher surfaces: room scenes in my display cabinet, boxes of furniture and armfuls of wallpaper. DS helped me grab stuff out of cupboards and pile it on higher surfaces. DH stayed on door duty, reinforcing the dam there and monitoring the garden. He also went out and found the fire officers helping nearby residents to ask for more information and to secure our place in the queue for a visit. At some point our burglar alarm went off, a default response to a power cut, so I had a frantic few minutes scrabbling for the instruction booklet to find out how to shut it off when the electronic control panel is dead (easy: rip it off wall, sprint back downstairs to find a screwdriver, unscrew back panel and rip out battery backup).
I don't know how long it went on, it felt like hours, but the BBC says that one month's worth of rain fell in one hour between 4pm and 5pm. Eventually the river into the garden started subsiding and within a few minutes had dwindled away to the point where we could open the back door onto our concrete threshold, now a little island surrounded by muddy water. I splashed over to the shed, grabbed brooms and we started sweeping the water back out of the house. We also started taking pictures for the insurance. We were so lucky that it never reached more than three inches inside, and thanks to the corridor dam, it did not flood the 'cellar' end of the basement nor the dollshouse room. It flooded the void under the sewing room but did not actually enter that room at floor level apart from a little area near the door. And of course, unlike many of the affected town residents, our actual living quarters are on a higher floor, so really we have got off quite lightly, nothing like the poor souls you see on the news whose lives are devastated by flooding every year.
The three of us wielding brooms eventually managed to get most of the standing water back outside, and I collected more old sheets and towels from around the house for wiping up as much of the remaining water as we could. By this point we were all exhausted so we just piled all the wet rags and carpets outside on the now-drained and muddy patio. I got on the phone to the out of hours line for the insurance company, then spoke to their Home Emergency line who advised that we could try turning the power back on as we didn't think water levels had reached the sockets (he said that the fuses would trip if there was any issue), and the power went back on fine so at least we had lights again. I went out to look for the fire people again for advice, but our elderly neighbour said they were rushing around town attending emergencies. He also recalled that this type of flooding had happened 30 years ago, when similarly a torrential downpour had overwhelmed all the sewers so that water poured through the town. DS cooked a makeshift supper while I was taking more pictures and trying to get through to the water company to see if the tap water was safe (since it tasted funny). We set up fans downstairs and opened all the windows and the door to try to help the drying out, and made sure the drains and airvents outside were cleared of debris.
A fire superintendant from a few towns away eventually arrived mid-evening to see if we needed any assistance, fire appliances from the whole region were helping to pump out cellars. He said the tap water should be fine, it's a completely different system from the storm drains. There wasn't anything more we could do so we collapsed into bed pretty early, but I found I just couldn't sleep well at all, I think it was a bit of post-event stress, I couldn't calm down enough to fall asleep properly.
So the next day I was pretty wiped out, as was DH. We put on a brave face to reassure DS (who is studying for important exams) and went down to survey the aftermath. Right away it was obvious we were going to have to lift the vinyl flooring to have any chance of the concrete subfloor drying out. Trouble is the vinyl flooring is fixed down in places where carpet or baseboards were attached onto it, plus we have the washer/dryer/treadmill weighing down some areas and nowhere else to put them. We moved things around as best we could and peeled up sections of the floor trying not to damage it, and put the fans to blow across them.
Luckily it stayed dry most of the day so I sorted the mountain of soaked towels and rags and hung out the ones I want to save, to start them drying before they went mildewy. I waited all day for the insurers to call me back, meanwhile putting in a token amount of work for my employer.
Tuesday I called the insurance company myself, and after being on hold for a very long time, eventually connected. They had no record of my call Sunday night to the out of hours line. After taking all my details again about the event, they inspected my policy and informed me that our compulsory excess for flooding is £10,000!! So no help there. I probably thought that wasn't an issue when I took out the insurance as we are nowhere near a river and the house has no history of flooding as far as we know. So we are on our own. We pulled up more of the flooring, and tilted the washer and dryer to inspect the bottoms. The washer mechanism is actually raised above floor level, it may be alright. The tumbledryer has a covered bottom and water started coming out when we tilted it. I called the manufacturers who consulted their repair department, they said it might be alright but we need it electrically tested before turning it on again. So I arranged for an electrical company to attend. They fortunately gave both machines the all clear, as well as the new lawnmower (submerged in the shed) and a leafblower and steam cleaner that were in the downstairs closet and got wet. We inspected the parts of the garden that had flooded, and discovered our apple tree had completely fallen over. Obviously its root system must be too shallow and the weight of the growing apples plus a river of water hitting it must have just been too much for it. We've cinched it back up by throwing a strap around a nearby magnolia tree but I think after harvest it will have to come out. A few large heavy pots had also floated about in the water, but otherwise the garden seems to have survived and is drying out.The shed was full of mud but apart from the lawnmower, all the tools etc were hanging on the walls after a fortunately-timed recent clear out so the shed just needs to dry out.
The exposed parts of the house floor were slowly drying but any parts still covered were of course still swimming in water. It was becoming clear that the whole floor was going to have to come out. It and the floor beneath it were all muddy and silted from the flood water. I booked an estimator to come and quote on a replacement. We had another sunny day so more towels got dried, and I swept up a bunch of silt and debris from behind the house and from inside the shed. I checked with the former owner of our house who confirmed that the subfloor beneath the sewing room was just dirt, which is good as I was worried that I had a concealed swimming pool down there but the water therefore should have drained away. We are keeping all the windows and door open, fans going, every day and we haven't put anything back as I'm concerned about mildew from the high humidity levels. I've re-arranged the evacuation piles upstairs so that we can live around them and also to make room for clearing out my office to turn it into an examination station for DS.
The estimator came back with a quote for £1,000 to replace the floors, so I cut the old floor into sections with a stanley knife and took it all outside on my day off. Almost a week later and the floor is still quite damp in some places, I don't know how long it will take to dry out. It was only underwater for a few hours but then the ground underneath it was probably quite saturated with water as well from the surrounding landscape, and we've had a couple more days of (normal) rain in the week. I've put things back onto shelves in my sewing room but kept the floor clear in case the void underneath is still drying. The dollshouse room is full of lots of stuff that came out of the utility room. The upstairs hallway is now full of the contents of my former office corner because it is now Exam Central for DS and looks like this (so clean!):
So not much sewing this week. Yesterday when my sewing table was finally clear, I did rescue the bits of my pink dress (one of the shoulder straps got into the flood water while the mannequin was being carried to safety - DH held up a bedraggled pink scrap the next day when we were clearing up and asked if it was important, I barely recognised it in time to stop it going into the bin) and have sewed a bit more on it. I've also continued to knit the cabled yoke piece of my t-shirt. I seamed the sleeves to the body and tried that on, it turns out when the knitting pattern emphasised with bold type that one should cast off firmly, they didn't actually mean really tightly. My cast off edge measured 11inches on the front and back pieces, I had to pull that back out and re-cast-off more loosely for a measurement of 13 inches which fits much better.
I hope you have had a calmer, and drier, week!
