Holy sewage flooding, Batman!
Wisconsin was a hotbed of storms yesterday, with seven counties statewide reporting tornado sightings. Milwaukee county (ours) wasn't one of them, but we got an unprecedented deluge of rain.
In fact, we got so much rain that the municipal sewage system of Milwaukee couldn't keep up with it. We have two sump pumps in our basement but the well was still overflowing. I came home after last night's concert to find poor David running back and forth with a bucket, bailing from the well to the laundry sink. I helped him with a wastebasket for a while but then started running around trying to pick things up off the floor that we wanted to save. Our downstairs office and rec room both had sopping wet carpeting, so we were digging papers out of file drawers and picking up cardboard boxes. At the worst point we had about 4 inches of standing water in the lower parts of the non-carpeted half of our basement where the laundry and storage is. We had lots of storage boxes get wet, but we haven't opened them since we moved here in 2005 so we probably don't really need them anyway.
The front page of today's paper said: "In Milwaukee, two south side buildings collapsed, rescue workers snatched people from cars stalled in streets turned to rivers, while pressure caused by storm waters gushing through city sewers flipped 200-pound manhole covers like pennies. At one point, water poured into the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District's deep tunnel system at a rate equivalent to 10 billion gallons per day..."
I called two different plumbers' emergency numbers, and they both said that there wasn't anything they could do since everyone in the area had this problem, and many had it far worse than we did since we have two sump pumps helping us out. I ran outside to check the downspouts to make sure nothing was backed up and also checked the outflow pipe for the sump pumps and the water coming out of the 3" diameter pipe was moving at a very high rate of both pressure and speed.
It certainly does give one perspective on the horrors that Katrina victims went through. This is peanuts, obviously, to that.
So now I have to go downstairs and do a huge load of sewer-water soaked towels. I think I'll run them through the rinse and spin cycle twice before I even start the wash....eeeeeew....
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2 comments:
What a pain for you guys! :-( I hope things are improving by now. Flooding in Wisconsin is making the national news. I thought of you. Hope it's not getting worse!
Coming from the land of no basements (California), the concept of sump pumps and downspouts is completely foreign to me. Makes me think that if I ever have a basement, everything in it should be stored at least one foot off the ground, just in case!
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