My Flood Watch

And when I say "flood watch" I mean watch these videos of our flooded basement. We got so much rain in the last 24 hours that our basement now has about 5+ inches of water in it. Our next door neighbor's house has about 13 inches of standing water in the basement. I think the rain's done for now. We have rivers instead of a driveway. I've cleared out a lot of the junk that's featured in these videos, and we've had to call the fire department to come pump out the water (we're about "a page and a half down" on their list, or we were about an hour ago). A shop vac won't do anything with this much water.

I called the landlord, who suggested we take a walk around the house looking for "mole holes," or places where there are holes in the ground against the foundation where animals have dug out and created tunnels. Apparently there's a trend to use our foundation as an animal Hilton during the winter. Toby and I did this, and only succeeded in getting really, really wet. (His office has 18 inches of water in it, so we're not the priority for him yet.)

I hope these videos come through. Sorry for the weak commentary but it's all I could think of. (And I should note that we haven't cleaned out our empty cardboard boxes--empty wine boxes--in like 18 months, so there's nothing like a flooding rain to inspire a box party.) These videos were taken 30 minutes apart, so things look pretty much the same in both. I went down a half an hour later and moved stuff out of the way and we have some kind of flow from the wettest part of the basement out the garage door. For those of you who haven't seen our basement, it's a pretty creepy place to be (I never look up because of all the cobwebs) even when it's dry. Under 5 inches of water it's plain depressing.