Misery Loves company - Home ownership

The flood of 2013.

I don't really know where to start.  The fiance and I were in Pittsburgh for work.  We had a security system and a flood prevention system.  We should have been golden.

It was April of 2013, Everyone in Chicago knew a gigantic storm was heading their way.  And everyone knew when it arrived.  4 AM Eastern time, I got a phone call from the security company.  The water detection system detected water.  That meant there was water in the basement.  I tried to go back to bed as I was in Pittsburgh, I had to show up to work, and there was absolutely nothing I could do.  I kept trying to tell myself, hopefully there was only a small amount of water, maybe the water was coming in from the window wells or something.

At 6 AM Eastern I called my dad.  I knew it was rude to wake him up, but I was getting worried about the house.  The village we live in had been sending us updates on the storm.  The storm sewers were full hours ago and there was "nothing the village could do."  Turns out, my father was awake dealing with his own issues.  Everyone I knew either had their own flooding issues, or they didn't have keys to the house.

Seeing as we had the locks changed after we moved into the house we never fully exchanged everyone's house keys.  My future in-laws didn't have keys, neither did any of our friends.  (this has since changed, Lesson Learned #1)

So I waited anxiously for my parents to be able to get to our house and tell us the damage.  Unfortunately, a few hours into the day my dad calls me to tell me his water problem is under "control" but they can't get out of the house.  I get these pictures from my mom to show what he means.


The black car is parked in the street my parents garage sits on.

 If you look closely, you can sort of see a firehydrant almost entirely under water.

My parents garage.  Obviously, no way they can drive in the street.  They may be able to get a car out of the garage, but then where?

If you look closely you can see a red car with the trunk open and the water almost all the way up to the trunk.  Basically, it wasn't safe to drive.

So unfortunately, we had to wait longer. By this time the storm had died down, so hopefully it was only a matter of time before we got news about the house.

At noon, I told my boss in Pittsburgh that I had to drive back to Chicago.  Our house was flooded and I don't know how long I'll be gone or how serious the flood is.  I suspected I'd be back by Monday as "I'm sure its not that bad."

And so my fiance and I made the 7 hour drive back to Chicago.  We hit Chicago around 5 PM.  It was then that I really got scared.  There was no traffic, literally no traffic. While driving from Indiana through Chicago to the North side of the city we didn't see a single break light.  Oh jeeze I thought.  This is not good news.  Also around 5:00 my parents made it to our house.  They said there was "muck" everywhere on the floor so we definitely got water, but it "didn't look bad."  They commented on how the basement kinda looked like we just threw everything there when we left.  I was confused, I knew we had a few "storage" areas, but I thought I left everything stacked in an organized fashion.

We finally got home around 6 or 7 PM.  The house was freezing, but that didn't matter we had the heat down low while we were out of town.  We immediately went to the basement to see the damage and turned up the heat.  We put on our work boots and decided to see how bad it was.

The facts:
We had wood paneling in the basement. Not my favorite thing in the world but not terrible, it was good quality.  There were water marks 15-20 inches up on the wood.  However, wood is not a reliable measuring tool when dealing with water.  There was a metal filing cabinet that had a water mark 11.5 inches high.  My fiance makes meade using wine bottles.  We store the empty wine bottles on their sides in the basement.  3 of the "levels" of wine bottles were filled with "water." The 4th was not.  The 4th bottle opening was at 13 inches off the ground.  The 3rd was at 10.5 inches off the ground.  So, we got water, we got a lot of water.  Somewhere around 11.5 inches.

We went into the basement powder room and saw "muck" in the sink as well as toilet.  "huh, so the water came out of the sink..... that means .... this... is .... sewage." Beautiful.  We went to the wet bar, there were standpipes in the wet bar sink.  The wet bar sink was full of water because the standpipes made it so it couldn't drain fully.  Definitely sewage.  There is no way anything could come out of the sink except through the drain.  Sewage.... Poop water.  We were walking in poop water.  We are breathing poop water.  omg. But why didn't the backflow preventer work?

TBC....