The Flood

Our intersection has a tendency to flood when we have heavy rain come in very quickly, but Saturday night was the worst ever. Kevin and I had rented Pirates of the Carribean III, and stayed up watching it listening to the storm. We kept peeking out the window watching our street fill up with water. Around 10pm a guy tried to drive down it and stalled his car. Kev ran out and helped him push it into our driveway. The guy came inside and watched Pirates with us for a half hour before going out to try his car again. Happily it started and he drove down the sidewalk to the end of the block to avoid the water.
Around 11pm, we decided to go to bed. Kevin thought he'd check the basement "one last time" before we headed up. Yep, you guessed it. We had about an inch of water in the basement. Crap. Kev started sucking it up with his wet/dry vac, and I bailed with a bucket. After about an hour we had 2 inches. We decided we'd better start moving stuff (luckily most of the things on the floor were in rubbermaid tubs). At 3am I went to bed, and Kevin drove to Meijer to get the LAST pump. By then we had about 10". Kevin pumped until just after 5am before coming to bed. At 7am when we got up we had another 6" in our basement. Brian and Pete came that morning to help us move out the rest of our stuff (THANKS SO MUCH, GUYS!). What a mess. In this second photo you can see the high water line - marked by the helicopters. For those who have been to our house the water went from there clear across the park to the gazebo. We are talking big lake. Everyone around us had water in their basements.
On Sunday we had another small storm come through (that's what these photos are from), and we let Elinore go splash around in the park when it was done. At least she thought it was cool. Happily we didn't lose any of our stuff (we still don't know about our washer, dryer, water heater, or furnace). We finally got down to concrete this morning and are trying to dry it out, so we should get to check those things soon.

It totally sucks, but I keep thinking about how much worse it could have been.