Thursday, May 7, 2015

First major storm of the season!


While I live for this type of stormy weather, it usually comes with a price. Last night we got hit pretty hard, mostly in terms of torrential rain fall here in town. The official total at the airport was recorded at 6" but there were places that got up to 12"-14"

Other communities south and southwest of here were hit by several tornados with extensive damage. So I consider myself lucky with nothing more than heavy rain.

They were forecasting bad weather all day, claiming it was coming that night, this was just after 8pm.  I had the urge to build an ark.




The storm lasted well into the early morning, but before I went to bed I thought I'd better go downstairs and see what if anything was happening.

Well, it's been awhile since I've had water in the basement and it's been so dry over the last several years that the ground has pulled away from the foundation. This allowed all the water to run down the outside walls and find several cracks to which to seep through.  Did I say seep?  I found a small river flowing from one end of the basement to the floor drain on the opposite end of the basement!

Why can't it leak right by the drain, why does it have to always be on the opposite end?

This was the first time I've had water on the floor since I redid it several years ago and installed the foam tiles.  If it wasn't for the tiles I don't think I would have had such a mess as the tiles allowed the water to react with a capillary action and spread almost throughout the basement.  I bet we pulled up 2/3rds of the tiles and wiped up the water.

Oh well it was time for a good cleaning.






They say we are due for another round tomorrow night and this weekend again?




4 comments:

  1. Oh boy that is a shame. Trust it all dries out quickly.
    I had a similar flood in my other shed and I had carpet tiles laid that soaked up a similar amount. Took days for them to dry and I have still not relaid them and that was three years ago.
    Trust you miss all the bad weather.

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    1. Yep, everything is OK!
      I had issues in the basement years ago that I repaired that helped a great deal. With the amount of rain we had and speed at which is came down it didn't have time to soak in slowly. Now everything should have swelled back up to seal things off. We're due for another round or two this weekend so I'm not planning to reset the tiles right way.
      That's life in Nebraska, extreme weather patterns.
      Having the foam tiles did work out pretty good, we just pulled them up, wiped them off and stood them up to dry. Then we wiped the floors up and turned the fans on. Pretty simple.

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  2. Glad you are able to clean it up easily. Sucks to get that much rain in such a short amount of time.

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    Replies
    1. I was really hoping it would have washed the trash away next door.

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