Well the preparation for hurricane Irene helped a little, but was not enough for the flood we had last week.
I left work at 2-o-clock on Wednesday because roads were starting to close because of high water. I got home to about a foot of water in our basement. In the five years I’ve lived at our house, the floor has only gotten wet a few times, and has never had any standing water.
We don’t have a sump pump, so I used a 5-gallon bucket and started to bail. After five hours of bailing, my good neighbor brought over his sump pump and we pumped the basement out.
My wife woke up at 2am, and checked the basement, it had around a foot of water in it again. I decided there was no use in trying to bail, it was still pouring outside, and my back was killing me, so we waited until 7.
When I made it outside my neighbor was already there to lend me his pump, we took turns all day an hour at my house an hour at his. Finally the water stopped coming in, just in time too, the last pumping of his basement and the pump stopped working.
On Friday I tried to get the chest freezer dried out as best as possible, had a box fan blowing on the motor & even used a hair dryer but when I plugged it back in it sparked & smoked.
So we made a trip to home depot. We got a new freezer that's now in our kitchen until I make a cinder block platform in the basement to raise it up. The rest of the day was spent watching flood coverage on the news.
Saturday I built a fire in the woodstove turned on the fans and me and my son spent the day taking everything in the basement that came in contact with the water outside, we scrubbed the floors, walls and everything touching the floors with Clorox, then cleaned everything outside and put it back into the basement.
Our corn & bean crop was in 10 inches or so of flood water so we're not going to get to eat any of it. Our raised beds did ok, although the kale & carrots are starting to die in one bed, most likely from too much water.
In two days we got over 8 inches of rain, I emptied our 4inch rain gauge twice. Overall we got lucky again, there were neighbors close by that had basements full of water and some towns not far from us that lost whole houses, bridges and roadways.
