The Great Small Flood of 2007

If you are following me on Twitter you probably know this already. If not let me tel you – I got flooded. Not much mind you, but only because 6 people were working on stopping the watter, and carrying buckets outside.

Initially it was fine. We have a pump dug into the ground below the floor level. When the water rises to a certain level, the floater triggers the pumping mechanism, and the excess water is dumped into the shower drain. My dad constructed this contraption after we got several feet of water here few years ago during the hurricane. Ideally it should be dumping the water outside of the building but the shower drain usually works…

Unless of course we are dealing with a Storm 2.0 Beta which pours water on you like there is no tomorrow. I think the drainage system got so full that it could not take it anymore. If you would flush the toilet, the water would rise, and wouldn’t go down. In this scenario, our pump was actually making things worse. Since the drain was backed up, the pump water had nowhere to go.

So we would collect the pump water into buckets, and carry it up the stairs and out the door. We had 2 people on the bucket drill all night, one person minding the pump, and scooping the water out of the shower and the toilet when it was getting to high, one person changing the towels in the areas where the water was leaking, and one person manning the washing machine and running a spin cycle on the soaked towels, 1 person acting as a towel gopher (collect wet, bring back dry) and one person to rest and/or attend to new leaks as they sprung.

Anyways, we won. Around 1 am the drains unclogged themselves, and we were able to stop running the bucket line. Around 3 am we managed to stop most of the leaks and clean up enough to catch some sleep.

Fun times.

As it is right now, my floor smells like sewage, and wet towels while and most of my possessions are hoisted on top of the furniture. The only good thing about this is that I will finally have a chance to get some cable management done. There is a tightly tangled knot of electronic cabling underneath my desk and I always wanted to clean it out and make it neat, but I was always to lazy to disconnect everything. Now I have a chance to do it.

[tags]flood, water, storm, drain, cables, sucks[/tags]