My wife told me that I’d love living on the east coast of Taiwan. We’d be really close to the ocean and the mountains. We could live in the country without a whole bunch of building around us. "What could go wrong? you may ask.
Super Typhoon Soudelor, the most powerful storm system of 2015, downgraded to a Category 3 hurricane, the same level as Katrina, decided to hit us. Well, close enough to dump a lot of rain and blow a hell of lot of that horizontally at us.
After last year’s adventure, I had already prepared plastic tarp and sandbags for the front door. Cleaned out the drains on the balconies. Stayed up all night checking for water. No problem.
Until 3:00 am when I went to check again and found water running out from under the kids’ bedroom door. Got my wife up and we started mopping. It looked like water was coming in buckets full from the glass door, so I look out and the water level in the balcony was higher than the door sill.
Time to go out into the storm. Soudelor hadn’t hit land yet, so we were at max wind, with winds of over 200 km/hr (120 mph). Fortunately, the wall on the balcony goes up waist high, so grabbing a bucket I went out to bail. I stayed below the level of the wall to keep out of the wind and threw the water up and over. It’s a pity we were working too hard to not video it because Soudelor would rip that water and sent it flying.
Finally, I was able to find and unblock the drain hole, allowing
the water to go where is was supposed to. Just when we were finishing up the room, my wife called me because water was pouring down the stairs from the third floor. It seems the room right about the bedroom also had a balcony full of water.
Rinse and repeat. Then we found that the tarp had come loose from the front door, so we were getting water flowing in there. While cleaning it up, the third floor balcony drain got clogged again with leaves blow in with the rain, so the room had flooded again.
Soudelor hit land about 5:00 am, and by 7:00 the storm had started to lose a little intensity. One of us needed to be by the front door pretty much continuously from 3:30 to about 8:30.
By 9:30 things were stabilized enough to take turns getting some sleep.
It looks like we’ll need to do something about the front door. Maybe fix some plywood which can be bolted over to keep the wind from blowing the water in. I’m not sure about the balconies. We’ve had a couple of typhoons last year and this was the first time to get flooding. Maybe having a hole drilled through the outside wall below the level of the sill may help it drain.
As unpleasant as it was, it could have been much worse. My wife was on a training camp in another city and kids were with her. They weren’t scheduled to get back until today, which means I would have been mopping water by myself.
Fortunately, although we lost a screen door for the third floor balcony, we didn’t suffer any serious damage. We’ve got friends with windows broken and trees down. There were over 2 million household without power, and some of our friends are still affected. Temperatures in the upper 80s with high humidity isn’t fun without A/C or even a fan. One friend doesn’t have water as well.
I’ve got an elderly friend with a heart condition, and he was up from 3:00 am mopping as well. He lives in a basement apartment and had water coming in from the floor.