So we’re at my boyfriends parents house, it’s late, everyone else has retired for the night, 'cept the two of us catching the tail-end of some movie or other.
me: “Do we have any snacks?”
BF: “I think there is a bag of chips downstairs”.
me: “Could you go get it?”
BF: “Sure.”
So boyfriend heads downstairs, and comes straight back up.
BF: mumbles something incoherent about mutual friend
me: ?
Then I remember: the last thing we heard about mutual friend was that he had managed to release about 5000 litres of water from a spontainiously inflated basin in the girl bathroom in the math building. This can’t be good.
I take a look downstairs, and lo and behold, we have a merrily sploshing indoor pool, were before there were only dry floors. Atleast a foot high, covering the bottom step of the stairs, and rising all the while.
Boyfriend knocks on his parents bedroom door.
BF: “Dad, I think you might want to see this.”
Various sleepy noises emerge from inside, but “dad” was finally convinced to come out and take a look, whereupon apropriate levels of hell broke loose.
So, in sum, the creek next to propperty has flooded, the garage has turned aquatic, and the entire basement is now a shallow wading area. We spent the remainder of the night trying to salvage books and furniture and generally doing something constructive until the emergency number could be reached. A fire truck, with ambulance in tow (I have no idea why the last one was needed), followed sometime later by a gigantic digging machine, arrived and parked in the pool that was previously a dead-end road. “Dad”, military man that he his, constructed a makeshift dike outside the garage, the neighbours threatened by the flood were woken upp, and the dog took the opportunity to escape.
Loss: one electric guitar, 50-60 books, a tonne of papers, two gigantic bags of no longer dry dog food, and god knows what else; the room where they keep packed-away boxes (among them some boxes containing my boyfriends old books and comics) was flooded, and they haven’t had time to sort through it all yet.
I feel really bad for my boyfriends dad, who has spent months renovating the downstairs apartment, looking to rent it. All that work, ruined.
On the up side, no-one was hurt, and we caught it early enough to prevent the water rising higher; it could have risen as high as a grown mans waist, and flooded three more houses further down the road. So we saved the neighbours property, and kept the damage to this house down to a minimum. Still, this suck.
Mundane and pointless to anyone but us, but this just felt so surreal at the time. We watched the men in strange uniforms open the storm drains, and the water started sinking. The familly is in good spirits, and if I know “dad”, he’s already repairing the damages. They have a good insurance, thankfully, so the monetary loss will probably be minimum. The stuff ruined can’t be gotten back, of course, but I supose it could have been a lot worse.