We had a little rain tonight

[Jonna]

About 4" in around 2 hours!!  I had no idea it was coming, it's a bit early for our rainy season to start but I guess no one told mother nature.  The street flooded and water came in our front door.  Mimi put some bags of wood chip mulch we'd just gotten across the hall and that kept some of it out.  We ended up with an inch or water throughout the first floor though.  I'm so glad for tile and concrete floors and lots of air flow.  We got it all cleaned up and everything is dry now.  The good news is that we had electric throughout and could use the shop vac and the pumps to get the ponds down.  The outside pond did overflow and the Mollies were swimming around on the patio.  We got most of them back in the pond safely.  I'm not sure what this will do to the water quality though, I'm a bit worried about the Angel fish.  I suppose I should consider this a practice run for a hurricane.  At least with a hurricane you know they are coming and I could have pumped the ponds and pool down before hand.  Silly me, I was out there watering this morning under blue skies and even topped off the pond.  Sheez!

It's really coming down


Mollies swimming out of the pond





my front door and garage, notice the waves?



Our front hall, redwood chips as sand bags.  The empty chlorine bottle was in the garage and floated in when I opened the door, a cat carrier came floating in from the garage too!  Plus, I had the garage door open and forgot and our neighbors came and they had rescued a whole big drawer of tools that had floated out of the garage and was headed down the street! 

[Joyce]

OMG! That looks scary. Can not imagine what a hurricane could do there. 

Is there any way you could add a drain here and there in strategic places through your house and patio?

Or maybe a trench drain just outside your front door?

[LynneNY]

That had to have been scary!   I can't imagine that much water pouring into my house - sorry you had to deal with that.

[HOWELL]

Oh Jonna I am glad you are ok.
Whenever we were driving from monclova to saltillo the other day we had to pull over because the rain was just so hard, and it was hailing too like really bad.
You could see nothing because of the rain so a lot of people had to pull over and we waited till it stoped.

[Jonna]

We have drains but they were overwhelmed because it was coming down so fast.   We have two actual dry wells, one in the front and one in the back and both of them had water pouring into them but couldn't keep up.  Same thing with the street drains, they just couldn't keep up.  I've been through several floods up in NoCal and this was a much better experience.  No dry wall, no carpet, no wood framing, no basement and nothing under the floors... so there is nothing to mold or that you have to replace.  A little water got on the base of the wooden doors but they are over a hundred years old and hardwood so resistant to mold and rot.  They are dry today and seem fine, not even a water mark.  Plus, it's warm!!  Every other flood I've been in was freezing cold and I was out there working with frozen fingers and toes.  This was a cake walk in comparison.   

We will have the floors mopped today and put the furniture back in place and that's about it.  Oh, they are coming over to check our cisterna and clean it out and disinfect it.  That is a large holding tank under the garage floor where water first goes from the city water.  It is then pumped to another tank on the roof through a set of filters and pressure tanks.  We shut off the pump when the garage flooded so the dirty water from the street wouldn't get pumped through our system.  They will clean the cistern today and it will refill.  Meanwhile we have water from the tank on the roof.  Pretty good system for being in a hurricane zone.  I think our biggest problem will be the garage because we had a lot of stuff laying around in there and not up and put away as it should have been   

Unfortunately, they are predicting a lot more rain tonight so I'm going to leave the ponds low and not feed the fish.   So far, the only casualty we know of is the mollie that Mimi saw swim down into the dry well.  It's not really a dry well, there's water at the bottom of it but we don't use it for anything but drainage.  I wonder, maybe the molly will live just fine down there.  If more than one went down then there will be a population explosion of Mollies in that well.  That would be kind of funny, a well full of mollies. 

Our neighbor down the street has a rain gauge and recorded 4 3/4 inches of rain in 2 hours!  No wonder it seemed there was a bucket over our heads. 

[HOWELL]

My house is maybe a meter or a meter and a half on top of the street so if it gets to flood my house won't suffer any damages..
I remember that when I was a kid we used to make ships outta paper and then run after them down the street...it was fun...
Now I like to get wet with rain and just go outta my house and sit on my amaka I hope I spelled it right......
I just love rain.

[Joyce]

March 30-31st we had a horrible rain storm that dropped over 13 inches in 2.5 days.
One week before that one we had one that dropped 6" in 2 days so the ground was saturated when the 2nd storm hit.

Many neighborhoods were declared disaster areas. (especially in a town called Riverhead about 10 miles West)
TODAY they are still pumping out basements because the ground water has risen 5-6' in some places because LI is flat and hardly above sea level.
The bank I use has 4 feet of water in the basement still, using over a dozen sump pumps with 2-3" diameter hoses,
all day, all night, since the end of March. 

Problem is, they are just pumping out into the street gutters. Then it just simply drains into the ground water table again.
And today we are getting torrential rains again.

If I could build a house, I would have the entire ground floor water proof like yours is. 
My doors would look like wood but they'd be that new synthetic stuff. (Trex?)

[Holldoll]

Wow! That's incredible! I'm glad everything is okay.  I noticed your furniture legs are wood are they ok too? 

Joyce, my DH family lives in Cold Spring Harbor and they were pumping out too.  I hope this storm isn't so bad.  In Hawaii that's why they build the houses on stilts.  You constantly need a sump pump if you don't build the house above the ground.

[Jonna]

I don't think there will be a problem with the furniture legs.  It was all so fast.  We had it mopped up and dry within 4 hours and they were only in an inch or so of water for about 2 hours.  It helps that it is warm and we have all the fans and doors open so there is a lot of air flowing through.  They came and checked the cisterna this morning.  There was no debris in it at all and the water was crystal clear.  I think the super heavy concrete cover really sealed it well.  We super chlorinated it and turned the pump back on.  That water is used for most things and is connected to an RO filter that we use for drinking water.  I usually brush my teeth with the city water but I will use RO for a few days. 

Joyce, that is the kind of flooding (mainly ground water rising) that we used to get in Marin County north of San Francisco.  Sump pumps running for days, the worst would be when the heaviest rain coincided with a high tide that backed up the storm drains.   I've had to replace everything in 2 downstairs units there several times.  There is nothing I hate more than pulling up rain soaked carpeting while cold and standing in cold water.  Ugh! 

Howell, that silent H got you, it's Hamaca.   

[water_sprite]

Man, that's a lot of rain......Glad everything's ok.....


Wish you could have sent some my way....It's dry, dry, dry here and probably gonna get worse.

Brenda

[HOWELL]

LOL...sorry...I am not that good with words...
Hamaca-amaka sounds the same to me in spanish...

[Jonna]

Yep, it sounds exactly the same.  The one that gets me every time is albahaca and alcohol, can't ever remember how to pronounce them right.  Oh, and jengibre - can't say that right ever, it always comes out like the word for gin.  So, if I want to buy some ginger they think I want some gin 

[HOWELL]

Hahaha...Albahaca is......
Yeah...some of them are tricky...