Our first flooded basement

About 5 a.m. this morning we lost electricity during a storm. In the midst of all the rain, our sump pump well continued to rise.

At 5:45 a.m. I went down and looked at the height of the water in the well. It was about 6 inches from the top. I attempted to go back to sleep thinking that the electricity would come back on soon. After lying there for nearly 10 minutes, I went back down to have a look and the water was all the way to the top, only a half inch away from pouring over onto the floor. Our basement is still used like a basement, concrete walls, carpet remnants but not carpeted, some exercise equipment and a lot of plastic and cardboard boxes.

The mood of this entire event was casual, as if it’s happening and I’m just dealing with it calmly, no panic whatsoever.

I decided that if I didn’t do something now everything on the basement floor would get ruined so I grabbed a plastic trash can and began filling it up half way, carrying it upstairs, pouring it down the toilet and repeating. I probably did that about a dozen times before the noise I was making woke my wife and she asked how she could help. At first I had her filling the other trash cans and I would run them to the toilet. After about a dozen of those I realized we couldn’t keep up. I told her to get anything off of the floor that she didn’t want ruined.

You must realize that throughout this entire event we were both having to carry a flashlight because it was early in the morning and pitch black in the basement.

While she’s moving stuff up off the floor, I’m still carrying water upstairs. The well finally poured over and we focused on getting everything moved to higher ground. Fortunately I got some cubicles from an old office. I now have (14) 4′ x 3′ desk areas about 3′ off the floor that I didn’t have two months ago. This kept us from having to carry everything upstairs because before I setup the cubicles we only had one 4′ x 8′ table in the basement. Everything else was on the floor.

Just before getting some of the last pieces moved higher, the water was as deep as 2″ in some areas of the basement and completely dry in others. This showed me just how uneven the basement floor is. We were both barefoot and the water was cold.

We finished at about 7:15 and went to the living room to relax. I went back down about 30 minutes later to see if it had gotten any worse. There weren’t any dry areas on the basement floor anymore. The water appeared to have stopped rising. Once the water on the basement floor creates a pressure equal to that on the outside it stops rising. And that turned out to be about 3″. Not 3″ everywhere. Just in the deepest areas.

The electricity came back on at 9:11 a.m. and the sump pump has since removed the flooding, although the floor is still wet.

In the end what have we lost? Empty boxes and carpet remnants, that’s it. We’ve lived here 2.5 years now and this is the first time we’ve had to experience this. It won’t happen again because I will be having a water pressure based backup sump pump installed.

I’m on my way now to Meijer to purchase a mop and some bleach to clean the basement floor.