The great Flood of 2010
Well I thought the weekend was going to be exciting, Hubby was home, no other things to interfere with play and all was going to be good.
How wrong can you be?
Saturday morning and the weather forecast was for possible thunderstorms during the day. Well they came early.
At about 3AM the heavens opened up and down came the rain in buckets. Far too much for the drains to cope and the water came up at the back of the house and seeped into the back spare bedroom over the dampcourse and under the ceiling to floor window and under the carpet.
Panic panic panic!
Towels mops and all hands to the pumps! At least it didn't last long and when we had a look the drain from the back of the house to the street was partially blocked and couldn't drain away fast enough in a downpour.
After cleaning up best we could in the morning instead of having a nice play with hubby it was ring a plumber who came with his evil contraptions and removed a lot of tree roots from the drain and we thought now all would be well.
Not to be!
At about 8PM on Saturday night the mother of all storms came. It had been raining steadily all day and the drains had been coping but it hit hard. Over 3 inches of rain in an hour and there was no way the drains could cope. They were flowing OK but up came the water again and this time much higher than before. Now we had over an inch of water over the carpet and in the hall as well in that part of the house. The playroom is next to it but it had a tiled floor and the water didn't get in there anyway. Murphy is alive and well here!
Well 9 PM at night and where do you get a wet and dry vacuum cleaner at that time of night or blow heaters or anything else useful to clean up after a flood? Rang State Emergency Services and they had over 1000 callouts to attend to and we were much better off than those with roofs blown off or trees landed on their houses. It was going to be days before they could get to us.
Mad panics to get a few boxes of things like photos that had been parked in there again after the flood the previous morning. Scoop up the water into buckets, dam it from going further, shamois and towels to soak it up, chuck them in the spin dryer and get the water out and repeat ad infinitum.
The towels soaked up most of the water at least what was in the carpet and marching in bare feet over the towels gats a fair bit of the water out of the underfelt too so up half the night to get things a bit better.
Off to the hardware store and got a heavy duty wet dry vacuum at 8AM and back to what I thought would be easier work.
NO no way! You have to push the attachment at the end of the hose well into the carpet for it to suck water from beneath the carpet and it's murder on the lower back.
After hubby and I taking turns all day just going over the carpets again and again we finally got things reasonably dry and with blow heaters its not too bad now. except for our backs! Certainly no monkey business last night and I'm still in pain when I bend over.
I had a nice warm enema this morning and hubby and I have been rubbing liniment into each others backs so that seemed to give a little relief.
Weather has been fine today after days of drizzle and we saw on the news that there were a lot of people worse off than us. At the hardware store the biggest selling items when we were there were immersion pumps to pump out cellars and low level garages and wet and dry cleaners. There were several big trees that just fell over with washed out roots near here and on the TV we saw places a couple of miles away where the whole driveway of a house collapsed and washed down the street.
In all a very awful weekend and the smell of heated wet underfelt now is revolting. Using cans of Glen20. Remains to see what the insurance company says they will do. We think a couple of pieces of cheap furniture are a lost cause as the bottoms got wet of course and chipboard swells like you know what when it gets wet!
Last time we had rain like this was about 15 years ago and it wasn't as heavy.
Oh well back to the cleanup. hugs
Jan