"Cheryl, I need help"
Those were the words I spoke to my neighbor at 8:30 am yesterday. I could see in her face that she immediately thought about Kathleen and the pregnancy, but something else was going on, something that my drenched rain parka and sopping shoes could attest to. We were being flooded.
Back in May, we had a small stream trickle down the back slope to our house. I wrote back then that someday I'll need to look into fixing the problem. That "someday" should have been any day before yesterday. For the previous couple of days, the weathermen had been doing their best to panic the populace with predictions of winter weather, ice storms, freezing temperatures and rain. We did not panic, but we didn't blow it off either. Friday night, our oldest came into our bed b/c the thunder was scaring him. I didn't think too much about it.
The above photos were taken on a decent-weather day, and simply give a view out back. On Saturday, it was raining hard and we had water cascading in a waterfall off the wall in the right hand picture. It was pretty neat and I immediately thought to get my camera. I was walking to the door to the back and got a couple of feet from it when I heard a splash. I looked down and saw water seeping under the kitchen door onto the tile. The camera was (gently) discarded and I went outside to figure out what I could do.
The runoff water had completely overwhelmed our drainage system and we had a small stream running across our patio (image from the May flood). It was a couple of inches deep which is enough to get over the door entry for both the kitchen door and the sliding glass door. Off of the patio, the water was much deeper and pooling up to the brick line above our slab. We found that was was seeping into the living room through the wall.
I quickly determined that I could not do anything by myself and got the neighbors. Roy has a truck and we went down to The Home Depot to get a bunch of sandbags. By the time we got back, Kathleen had enlisted our other neighbors and they built a series of channels diverting the water away from our back. We sandbagged the house and waited for more water. It has yet to return with the fury of Saturday morning, but we are expecting freezing rain and ice for the next 24 hours. When that melts, who knows what will happen.
Someday, I really need to do something about our drainage. I think some sloping, grading and berming can cause the water to runnoff away from the patio, which should halve the water that the patio will have to take care of. That should probably do it, but I think we'll beef up the French drain in the patio, as well as provide an alternate channel.
Posted at 01:34PM Jan 15, 2007 by schnee in Life |