September 11th wasn't a good day around here. We woke up early to a cloudy sky which began to pour on us around 5:30 a.m. and it didn't stop! It rained more that day than it had all last year combined.
Here is what happens when the Santa Clara area gets rain it isn't expecting:
Our house isn't near here, so we weren't flooded out. But what happened was a dike broke. Most people (myself included) had no idea it was a dike. I thought it was just a walkway between the junior high and high schools to the Santa Clara City Park. The people below the dike didn't know it was there either because no one had flood insurance.
I had been in town (that's a small town phrase for you) and it was raining really hard on my way back. I was a bit afraid that I wouldn't get home because a lof of the roads were flooded out. But there was still one road that I could use to get home. It was crazy.
This was the road I found that wasn't flooded, although it was flooded later on:
I was home for about 30 minutes when I heard an alarm go on. It was a buzzing that I had never heard before. I went outside and the sound disappeared. I realized the sound was coming from our basement. I ran downstairs and the sump pump alarm was going off and there was about 1 inch of water in our basement. Ugh!!
I tried calling Bryan on his cell phone but he was in a meeting and not answering. So I called our builder to find out what to do. He told me that we weren't the only ones in the neighborhood that were flooding. I asked him how to get the sound to go off and he said he would have the plumbing people call me (who happen to know Bryan). A few minutes later they called and walked me through turning off the alarm and resetting the pump.
Our basement is unfinished so we just have a hole in the cement where we will eventually put a toilet. The water was draining (thank heavens!) down the drain but the pump should automatically turn on and pump the water out. But it wasn't working and so the alarm went on. After testing it a few times, over the phone with the man, he decided that we need someone to look at it.
Meanwhile, I called my parents to see if I could use their wet/dry vac and to get some help since I still hadn't heard from Bryan. They were in Zion looking at the rain (ugh, retired people NEVER stay home, hahaha). But they left to come back to help me vacuume up the water.
Bryan eventually noticed on his phone that I had called and came home to help with the clean up. I was using our carpet cleaner to try and get some water out, but it was slow. I was glad when my parents showed up with their vac.
It took about 5 hours but we got it all cleaned up. I am glad that we didn't have our basement finished or it would have been a much bigger deal. I also keep almost everything in big tupperware totes so we didn't have a lot of damage. And it was a blessing to find out about the sump pump before we finished anything in the basement. So it worked out for us but it wasn't the way I wanted to spend my day!
Our rug draining in the garage:
The water in Courtney's play room:
This is the window well that caused the flood. Our drainspout is right outside of this on the corner of our house. I put an extra pipe on the end of the drain spout to run the water to the lawn in case we had a lot of rain but it had somehow made a trench back to the window well. Maybe the well was down hill from where I had put the pipe, I don't know. So that's why the water filled up the window well and it came in the basement. Crazy!
The water didn't get into the farthest west bedroom or the food storage room. So we did have some dry spots.
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