Wednesday, March 05, 2008

A Bit of a Flood (aka Spring)


Sorry for the late post this morning. I've been dealing with a bit of a flood. Living halfway up a mountain doesn't keep me safe from such things--especially as I live next to a ski resort that has, oops, had, 4 feet of snow on the slopes.

The ground was already saturated and muddy from the natural snow's melting before the rain started. Then last night I got something over an inch of rain. Add that to the snow on the mountain, and the result is a once a year (hopefully no more) prescription for a flooded basement.

The rain stopped about 2 hours ago, but it's still coming in the basement. The ground water comes in through the casing of the well line. I currently have 2 sump pumps running, and the basement is down to about an inch deep--from 3-4-5 inches--but until the water stops running off the mountain, the water will likely continue to come into the basement. Hopefully, that won't last much longer. I have one battery powered pump and one electric pump. I learned my lesson years ago when I had both a flooded basement and a power outage. After that, I bought a battery-powered pump to add to my collection.

My first photo today is not a stream. It's an ordinary hill at the ski resort with a lot of water running down it. The ski slopes themselves are not as bad as I feared, but now instead of having 3-4 feet of snow, we have 1-3 feet of snow. That's a lot of water.
The second photo is a normally tiny seasonal stream that's at least 4-5 times its normal size. My lane is washed out this morning, too. It's the kind of thing that makes me glad of having 4-wheel drive. One thing I won't have to worry about is that once my flooded basement is done flooding, I won't have a river or a stream rise to worry about, and many people around here will have that concern well into Friday.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

One person's blessing is another's curse. I was glad for the rain as it flooded the local farm pond and with all that water in it there should be plenty of mud for shorebird migration as the pond slowly recedes. Hope the your basement wasn't too much of a mess and that the river behaves.
Vern

Anonymous said...

Yikes, that's never good to water in your basement. Too bad you couldn't train your dogs to bail out the basements for you.

Chris said...

Good luck with your basement! I guess spring has its price!

Anonymous said...

The power of water has always amazed and frightened me. I hope you dry out soon.

Carolyn H said...

Thanks to all for commiserating about my flooded basement. It's improving now--I'm down to less than .25 inch in there, which isn't enough to pump any longer. Hopefuly, even that will be gone by tonight.

Carolyn H.