This is a story all about how my life got twist-turned upside-down.
Ever have one of those days? Life is good, everything is going along swimmingly (foreshadowy “Hah!”), all seems right in the world; then the universe kicks you in the teeth, knocks you down, steals your lunch money, and anally rapes you with a large cactus. That’s what I consider a good day. I would have taken one of those days.
Wednesday was a good day. I’m done with school (I teach college), my wife’s almost done with school, my mother’s coming in for a visit (I’m in St. Louis, the family’s in New Hampshire), and I’m generally feelin’ fine. I even finally got confirmation of my teaching job next year (I’m adding a half-time elementary music job to my half-time college voice gig). I was feeling great. Life was good.
I picked up my mother at the airport. When we got home, there was a message on the phone; my wife got a second interview for the summer job she’s wanting to help out with summer expenses (Container Store: she’s very excited). The choir we sing in has a concert this weekend (this is why my mother chose this week to visit); we had a rehearsal Wednesday night. I ran to a deli to grab dinner. On the way home, it started storming. Not unusual for this time of year.
The downpour was heavier than usual. It was a rainy week, and apparently both the ground and the storm sewers were saturated. As we relaxed for a few minutes before rushing off to rehearsal, the street rapidly turned into a river. I had my doubts as to whether we would be able to get out, or if we would have to wait for the rain to stop. I checked weather.com, and was amused to discover it claim that it was cloudy with a 40% chance of rain.
I went out to the car to grab an umbrella, which was in the trunk. On the way in, I decided to check the rear outdoor stairwell.
See, we have a door in our basement, which leads into a stairwell, which leads to the back yard. There’s a drain at the bottom of the stairwell, which gets clogged with leaves, which, in a heavy rain, leads to standing water that seeps under the door and leaves me with a wet floor. Not a huge deal; a couple of hours with a shop-vac the next day, and we’re golden. It’s happened two or three times sine we moved in. The seals around a couple of the windows that the previous owner boarded up are also beginning to give way, so we’ve got another couple of points of entry. Again, not that big a deal, just an annoyance that I have to deal with until I get it fixed. Sure enough, there was about eight inches of standing water at the bottom of the stairwell. There was also ankle deep water in the back yard. I cleared the drain as well as I could, and went in to check the basement.
This was an unusually heavy rain, so I wasn’t surprised to see water seeping in in all three places. Annoying, since I wanted to spend time with my mother doing things other than drying out my basement, but that’s the price of doing business (or something). I went outside to give the drain one more try. By this time, water was shin deep in the yard and pouring rapidly down the stairs. Water was over a foot in the stairwell. I fought a losing battle with the drain, and ran back in, thinking by know that I would definitely have to wait for the rain to subside before we left for rehearsal.
I came back in the house to hear my wife shouting from the basement. I ran down, to find her yelling, “It’s pouring in!” The water, which in the time it had taken for me to run around the house and inside, had risen to over three feet, and had pushed in the door above the latch. Gallons of water a second were pouring onto the basement floor. Not knowing what else to do, I went to try to shoulder the door closed. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Hold the door until the rain stops and the stairwell drains? Who knows.
Whatever it was didn’t work. The water was pouring down the stairwell far too fast to matter what I did. The water almost immediately topped five feet or so, and the door gave way. My wife was treated to a movie-like spectacle of me being tossed back by the door followed by me being swept across the basement floor by a five foot wall of water. The water knocked me back hard enough to dislodge my wedding ring, which is now lost in the detritus. She ran upstairs. I, not thinking entirely clearly, tried to get to the door to close it again (yeah right), then ran around trying to think how else to stop the water (yeah right), before giving up and getting the hell out of Dodge. I came upstairs to my wife frantically talking to a 911 dispatcher trying to explain things, thinking that I was dead or dying in the rising deluge.
The soaked carpet that I was worried about? Well, it was soaked. Under three feet of water. Our furniture destroyed. The TV and stereo, gone. My digital piano is a total loss (insult to injury; it’s also covered in cat litter). Washer, dryer, treadmill, bowflex, hundreds of books, old photos, Christmas ornaments; name it and we probably had it down there. I managed to save the bulk of our music texts and scores, although the bookcase collapsed as I was removing the latter.
The water did stop. It stopped just in time to save many of our books, our DVDs, our tools, the Teacher’s Edition series of elementary music books that will come in handy next year. Amazingly, our electrical system came out unscathed. Our A/C blower still works. We thought the water heater somehow made it, but last night there was no hot water. But almost everything less than 34 inches off the ground is gone, a great soaking muddy, smelly mess.
The following seven hours was non-stop frenetic activity to try to figure out what to do. My wife called everybody she could think of: the sewer district, the fire department, Roto-Rooter, everybody. Neighbors came out to help. One stayed for hours, helping us keep drains clear, driving me to Home Depot to buy a pump (twice: the first one had the wrong connection). I spent most of that time mucking around in that disgusting water (I got a tetanus shot yesterday). The last of the water finally ran down the basement drain at 1:30am. I spent an hour trying to wind down before finally going to bed. I didn’t sleep. My heart was still racing, and as I came down off my adrenalin high, I realized that the initial blow back from the surge probably hurt me more than I realized. I ached. Ached all over. My right side, where the door hit me, is covered in scrapes, cuts, and bruises. Looking back, I’m damn lucky that I didn’t break anything, or get knocked out, or my wife’s initial fears for my demise would have been morbidly accurate.
Day two consisted of calling insurance (again: my wife put in the initial call the night before), who encouraged us to call the professional cleaners. We set up an appointment to meet with one. We had no idea how expensive this would actually be, nor whether insurance will cover any of it. But we figured that if it was somewhere around $5000, we would hire them. We need this to be done right. The guy quoted us 4-5K, so we’re going that way. The alternative is to subject ourselves, friends, and family to days of unhealthy conditions while we try to lug, demo, clean and whatever else while the mildew and mold builds up in the rest of the house.
I put in an all-call to all of my St. Louis Facebook friends. They responded. We had people all day, lugging up what we could save, sorting and boxing everything, blow drying the scores that had gotten damp when the bookcase collapsed. I felt largely useless. My mid-afternoon I had been up for 30 hours with no sleep. They made me take a nap, which lasted one glorious hour before I got up and started helping again. Pizza, beer, and another 7 hours of work, I finally went to bed last night, at 40 hours on one hour of sleep.
Today the professionals do their thing. The insurance adjuster is coming (whether they pay or not seems to hinge on whether it is deemed a structural failure or not). I’m hoping that I can actually take my mother somewhere that isn’t a damp, mildewy house.
If insurance doesn’t pay, we’re probably out $40,000-$50,000 in losses and cleanup. That doesn’t include remodel. We also need to hire a contractor to fix my leaks and remodel the stairwell to prevent a recurrence with the money we don’t have.
On the other hand, we’re all right. The cats are all right. What we lost was stuff. A lot of expensive stuff, and a lot of sentimental stuff, and a lot of important stuff (almost all of our language texts, which for vocal musicians, is a BIG DEAL, are gone). But we’re alive and OK. (Of course, as I write this, the supervisor for the clean-up job just fell and twisted his ankle badly.)
So, to sum up; I’m going to remodel my basement!
