Pumping and mopping

I hate taking days off from work. I value my vacation days and hoard them for things like vacations, when I take them.

My mom had cataract surgery on her second eye today. My brother had the day off, so he agreed to take her to and from surgery. I scheduled tomorrow off to take her for her follow-up surgery.

It turned out I had to take today off, too.

A huge locomotive of precipitation rolled diagonally through much of the Northeast yesterday. Upstate New York got some of the ugliest of it in the form of snow and ice, but Northeastern Pennsylvania was treated to heavy and nearly continuous rain. It lightened up a bit yesterday afternoon and evening, and when I went to bed our basement was still dry. I hoped for the best and failed to prepare for the worst.

I woke up this morning at 4:30 and put my sleep-sensitized hearing to work. No tell-tale bubbling of water seeping through concrete anywhere. I switched on the TV and watched the weather for a bit. I got up and out of bed at 5:00 and headed for the bathroom. As usual, my cat Nicky raced ahead of me, wanting to get into the bathroom before me.

He made it two feet into the bathroom and stopped. I didn't need to switch on the light to know why.

The "unfinished" part of the basement was full of water. Just a thin film in most spots, about three-quarters of an inch at its deepest in the corners. The bathroom had water that had seeped in from the bordering section of the basement - again, just a thin film.

Dammit.

I could have set up some towels on the floor in preparation - wet towels serve as fairly effective barriers to water flow, for a little while anyway. I could have gotten up at 2:00 or 3:00 and checked to see if I needed to set up the pumps. I could have done a few things. But I hadn't.

I got out my pumps and extended the hoses out through the garage door. I fired them up and started pumping. I grabbed some junk towels, and some beach towels that have only seen the beach once in the past four years, and started sopping up the standing water. I noticed that the water levels were rising, and that the water in the bathroom had now flowed out the bathroom door.

Fine. I would have to call off.

Six hours later I'm still pumping. We had one final burst of rain around 7:00 this morning, but now it's done, and it was downright sunny not too long ago. The first towels have already been in and out of the washer and dryer and are about to be pressed into service again; towels in the dryer wait to replace them, and towels in the washer are waiting for their turn in the dryer.

This isn't as bad as past floods, and it's the first flood we've had since we - and a helpful Nanticoke city official - convinced our neighbor to stop directing all of his downspouts onto our property. (Now he is merely directing most of his downspouts onto our property.) I had hoped we would get away without basement flooding this time, but I guess that was just unrealistic.

Soon the pumps will go dry, and the towels will have absorbed as much remaining water as they can, and it will be time to break out the mops and buckets and disinfectant again. I wonder if I'll have to just use bleach again? Hooboy...


UPDATE, 7:20 PM: All done. That only took me...all day.

Well, most of the time I wasn't actually doing anything. Set up pumps, let run. Throw down towels, sop up water, wash towels, dry towels, repeat. Mop floor, let dry, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Damage was minimal. Well, nothing actually got damaged, though there's always the chance of mold and mildew down the road, despite my use of bleach as a disinfectant. (I finally got to use those stupid white sweatpants that look ridiculous whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't involve mops and bleach!) You learn a few things after going through this drill a dozen or so times. If you haven't learned from hard experience, Ashley from Ink On Paper wrote an excellent article for Associated Content called "What to Do about Basement Flooding." It's a must-read for anyone who has ever had to deal with this problem, or anyone who may be dealing with it in the future.