Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Flash Flood


I woke up this morning about 8:30 to a massive thunderstorm. Wind, lightning, hail, and lots and lots of rain. The weather service figures we got between 3 and 5 inches of rain in about an hour and a half.

By 9:30 you can see what it looked like in our front yard. The plastic garbage bag above came floating down the street along with someone's recycling bin spilling plastic bottles and other assorted junk.


This is the worst flooding I've ever seen on our street. As we watched the water rise, we hurried to the basement because when the storm sewers stop up, the water backs up into our basement. We have a stand pipe to put into the floor drain, but the drain pipe for the set tub next to our washer was gushing water. My husband (the hero!) was able to lift off the set tub and plug the top of the pipe and we set up a levee made of old sheets to try to direct the overflowing water toward the sump pump.


That's me standing in the street trying to unplug the storm sewer with a broom handle. It wasn't blocked up that badly; it's just that there was just too much water.


By noon the waters had receded.

Things are much worse around the metropolitan area. They are advising people to stay off the roads because so many of them are flooded and there are power outages all over the place.

Hopefully, this rain will let up soon. If not, we've still got the canoe in the backyard...

*smile*

6 comments:

Pokey said...

Amazing that the waters can come up so high, and then recede by a few hours. I hope you are all okay, without too much muddy clean up....

Miriam said...

Goodness, that must have been a lot of rain!! Lucky it receded quickly.

Ali Honey said...

I'm glad it has receded now. It always makes you think "what if we had not been at hone!".

ranette said...

Glad you made out okay. I saw the flooding in Louisville on the news...it's just terrible.

Laura said...

Oh my! It's lucky that you knew exactly what to do to keep the water out of your home!

Deb Geyer said...

Looks like quite an exciting time! I hope all is well now...