The Flood of 2011

 My cousin Anj suggested we have a One Year Old photo shoot with Lola. I, of course, was all for it, so we set it up for a few days after Christmas. We needed a bright sunny spot and I thought my living room would be perfect if we pulled the blinds all the way up. The night before I had a realization. My Christmas tree is right in front of the window! I need to move it! So Sam and I got up bright and early to put the tree away. We keep all the holiday decor in boxes and tubs under the house in the crawl space, along with our food storage and a ton of other junk. I sent Sam down to the crawl space to get the Christmas tubs, which is when we found this:

 At first I thought the water bottles had broken some how, but we eventually figured out that somehow our crawl space was flooding. I went down and as I stepped onto the ground, which is gravel covered by plastic, my foot sunk into the plastic and my foot was covered with water, up to just below my ankle. I couldn't hear any water running, so what was I supposed to do. I got out of the crawl space and started bumping in to walls. I didn't know what to do or where to start. I called Matt, he didn't know what to do and couldn't come home from work. I started contacting neighbors to warn them that they might have water under their homes as well. We are all connected after all.  I called Anj to postpone the photo shoot. Then I continued bumping into walls. Matt called one of our neighbors, who was nice enough to come over and help me. He tied some plastic bags over his shoes and got into the mess, and started passing stuff up to me. I spread a tarp out on the carpet and started setting the wet stuff on the tarp.

I lost my baby in this mess. Can you find her?

 As he passed stuff up to me my neighbor suggested I call my insurance dude, which I did, and Insurance Dude knew just who to call. He gave me the name of a disaster clean up company who sent a guy out to take a look. Disaster Guy couldn't find the source of the water either, but when he checked my water meter in front of our house he could hear water. Lots of water, but the meter wasn't running. So we called the city. They came out and listened and then said it wasn't their problem since it was in a private development. They suggested I call someone on the HOA board so I called the President. We got the name of an excavator from the Disaster Guy, who came out a little while later and used his  witching stick (it works, we tried it!) to pin point where the water was coming from. Excavation Man asked the Pres. for the plans of the neighborhood, which she was able to find and which also confirmed what he found with his witching stick. The next day Excavation Man started to dig. 

Poor baby was stuck in this for  a while to keep her safe and out of the mess.

It's not every day we have a back hoe in our front yard.

I scared the heck out of him when I took this picture. When my camera flashed he thought he hit some electrical lines.  Oops!

The plan was to spot dig until they hit the spot with the leak. They found it in the third hole they dug. There was a broken pipe about six feet down. It wasn't actually broken, it had three pin holes in it. No idea how they got there. The water seeped into my crawls space from there.  I went to a funeral just as they found the leak. I was there for about four or five hours, helping with the luncheon, and when I got back the pipe was fixed, the water in my crawl space was gone and they put my yard back. The grass will be replaced when warm weather returns.  They didn't have to dig up any side walk or road. My house was locked up while I was gone so I have no idea how they got the water out of my crawl space. I was impressed. We had the Disaster guys come back and take all the plastic out of the crawl space and then they sanitized the whole thing. It's going to take months to dry out, and the sanitizing should prevent mold and mildew from growing down there. We put most of the stuff that was down there in the attic. The food storage is just stacked up in my little kitchen. We lost one box of junk that was down there waiting for a yard sale or a trip to the DI, and about four rolls of toilet paper. Not bad considering how much was down there and how much water got in.