Thursday, June 22, 2006

Water Woes

As all of you in Toledo know, and all of you elsewhere saw on TV, it rained here yesterday. A LOT.

Here in Sylvania Township, I received just under 7" of rain in around 4 hours yesterday evening. There was also a lot of wind with a few tornadoes just north of me. The lightning was also unbelievable. The rain fast became the headline, though, as much of Lucas County learned. Many streets in and around Toledo were flooded, and area basements were meeting the same fate.

I was in an intense struggle to keep my basement dry all night. There were periods when the water was rushing in faster than the sump pump could keep up, but thankfully that situation didn't persist for more than 15 minutes. I'm most thankful that the power stayed on. Had I lost power, I would have lost the basement. And with all the rain and lightning, power was a question mark for many hours.

Many of my neighbors didn't fare as well. This morning many had firehoses strung out of their basement windows with water gushing from them. Some were drying out wet carpeting, and at least one home had a Servpro truck in it's driveway. So compared to thousands of others in the area, I was very, very fortunate.

The weather threatened again today and I knew I couldn't take any more rain with my current pump arrangement. I called my parents in Fort Wayne very early this morning for advice, and they decided to drop everything and come up here to help. They brought a generator and a couple of extra pumps for a stop-gap until we can put in a battery backup pump. I'm incredibly grateful for their help today, without them it would have been so much harder to deal with this event.

It turns out today's weather passed mainly to my south, so I lucked out again. There's still water from yesterday's storm gushing into my sump pump pit, but the pump isn't having to run quite as much as it did yesterday. All in all this storm turned out to be beneficial in that it is a benchmark for me to plan for a worst-case scenario involving my basement pump network. I discovered I need to add a battery backup pump and a new higher-capacity primary pump. So now I know next time a storm like this happens, I'll be ready.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow. I'd give an Arm and a leg for an INCH of rain. We haven't had 2" from ALL STORMS COMBINED for the last 6 months!