My Own Little Flood, Part One

Frankly, I've been putting this off -- although it's one of the first potential topics I jotted down, when I was worried that one day soon I wouldn't have anything to say.  (So likely, don't you agree?)  But it's unseasonably warm here in northern New Jersey -- practically spring-like, really, and there's a steady rain falling -- so I guess this is as good a time as any...

First, let me clarify -- 'My Own Little Flood' means just what it says.  As I go on, to itemize and explain the events of spring, 2010, on a little property astride the border of South Orange and Newark NJ, I want to stress how painfully aware I am, of the relative puniness of my challenges, past and present.  It was only six months ago, as a matter of fact, that the governor of Iowa was talking about 'the worst flooding' he'd ever seen in his state.  And the year before, levees and sand bag dams were savagely pushed aside by Iowa's swollen rivers.  Homes and businesses were inundated.

So it's not as though I don't realize how lucky I've been.  What I can't grasp, however, is why such (relative) good luck was so devastating to me, physically and emotionally, and how such a minor inconvenience, relatively speaking, has led to such profound grief.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

At the approach of late March and early April, for the past couple of years, John and I are prone to watching the weather reports carefully, and cringing a lot.  We've had, over the past ten years, at least four 'water events', as I euphemistically call them, in spite of the fact that, on our first inspection of our new home, both of us were impressed by how dry the basement smelled and felt.  How were we to know that 2002 marked the fifth year of a drought in northern New Jersey?  What did we know of restrictions on watering lawns, or washing the car in the driveway?  We were living in institutionalized denial, in an apartment in Jersey City, after all.  Water comes out of the tap.  Then you turn it off.  Simple. 

So, when there was that first heavy April snow, in 2004 I think it was, we thought nothing of it.  There was a steady rain after that, but it always rains in April -- May flowers and all.  What rocked our world, then, was the sudden appearance of pools of water in the basement -- first by the stairs, along the front wall, and back by the dryer, but soon spreading all the way across the floor, to a depth of maybe two inches.  At first, I thought I could sop it all up with a couple of bath towels.  Then I was thrilled that we had an excuse to buy a wet/dry vac, and I got to take a few days off from teaching in Philadelphia, even if it meant straining my back because I was emptying the three-million gallon vacuum cleaner every twenty minutes, into the basement toilet.  As I dimly recall, that initiating flood lasted about a week, and then things went back to a slightly soggier version of normal.  I promised myself to put everything up on stilts.

We had another such brief attack, a year or so later, and our next-door neighbor was flooded too --to his amazement.  He's lived here 50 years, he said, and he'd never had water in his basement before, ever.  As is often the case in situations like this, I felt slightly guilty.  Certainly, my mere presence musts somehow be to blame.  Before I could drift too far in this direction, the rains let up, the vacuum finally hit dry pavement, and I finally discovered that that plumbing fixture, countersunk into the basement floor, near the hot water heater, was an outflow valve.  Now they tell me! Should a 'water event' ever happen again -- God forbid -- I could say good bye to the three million gallon wet/dry vac, and conquer nature with a big squeegee!  However, in spite of this built-in remedy for future such events, I nevertheless promised myself to put everything up on stilts.

I suppose then, that as the calendar pointed toward the springier months of 2010, I should have been more braced.  (Or at least begun, as promised, to put everything up on stilts)  But in my heart of hearts, denial and hope were having a love feast, and I was overcome by the resulting fumes.  Plus, we had discovered the floor drain, and I already had the new big squeegee.  With the wet/dry vac in reserve.  We watched the snow pile in record amounts.  Torrential rains followed, right on cue.  But this time, we reached a new level of the old familiar event.

The first place to show an imminent basement 'water event' in our house, is along the seams between the slabs of poured concrete flooring.  They go grey and sullen, and soon water is rising.  The water never comes down the walls -- it literally forces its way up from underneath the house.  So I could tell, when those junctures started looking damp, that we should get ready.  And when, sure enough, I woke one morning to see a sheen of shallow water at the foot of the basement steps, I knew exactly what to do.

I went to the washing machine, not concerned about splashing through the inch or so of water already spreading under things.  I found my big adjustable wrench, and splished back over to the floor drain.  This would be such a snap.  I got a good grip on the square cap, and in anticipation of relief, at watching the water all around me obeying the laws of gravity, I gave the wrench a healthy, gratifying pull.

Gravity was apparently not paying attention.  Although that drain cap had come off easily, in my hand,  there were clearly other powers at work.  Malign powers.  Repellant powers.  Instead of an outflow of cold ground water, there was an inrush of dark, deeply disturbing liquidity.  I tried, instantly, to get the drain cap back into place, against the flow.  There was no alternative -- I had to feel, to see how it fit.  The floor pipe was threaded, I could tell.  The cap, I realized after trying -- while screaming at the top of my voice 'There's shit in my house!!!' -- had nothing like threads on it at all.  I had to wedge it into place as well as I could, against that urgent foulness that wanted out.  I grabbed at anything I could find -- some old scraps of towel -- to push into place, as a feeble fabric dam.  By the water heater, for some reason I don't recall, was a large rock, flat on one side.  I pulled it over and stepped on it, hard, on top of the escape drain that was supposed to have been my salvation.

There followed weeks and weeks of relatively low-impact horror and torment.  Concerned about possible danger from what was already in the house, John and I slept in the attic.  Every day, I pulled on my old green rubber boots and the shop vac, and tried to hold back the tide of what was now mixed materials.  Nothing was backing into the house from the exit valve now, but the ground water continued to push its way in.  Always stopping, it seemed, at about two and a half inches.  Only slightly deeper in some places.  But for me,  never shallow enough, anywhere.

We called plumbers, who said we had to call the city.  We called the city, who said we had to call another city.  I vacuumed.  John vacuumed.  The cities talked.  They sent crews.  We vacuumed.  (One crew, interestingly enough, checked upstream from our house to see if the blockage was there.  Sometimes I despair)

The street in front of our house was excavated, torn apart and delved into.  They brought in a crew with a hi-tech fiber optic tool, but no matter how they threaded it, they couldn't see the problem.  Which, thanks to God, they did acknowledge was there.  A public works official, from the town to which we pay our taxes, stopped by to tell us that, when things were all fixed, we would need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a dry well in our back yard.  I went back to vacuuming.

We burned out one vacuum motor.  We sent for a replacement motor, and bought another one.  The torment of the water seemed endless.  The street in front of the house was impassable.  At one point, the excavation crew struck down and through an old ceramic pipe, and a dismaying upsurge of wetness literally chased the young crewman up out of the hole to safety.  Finally, the real problem -- some broken old pipes, that had caved in on themselves -- was located, and only a few days later, that particular problem had been addressed.   Except for tamping down the traces of excavation, and repaving the road.  Perhaps it's no surprise that, because I was still in the basement, still bent over the vacuum, I didn't really care about that.

And as I vacuumed, I was also moving things, from one side of the basement to the other, because now the sanitation crew needed to come in, to clean up.  Which couldn't happen until the insurance adjuster stopped by, to check on the damage, and assess what they might return to us, from the premium payments we'd been making for all the uneventful years we've lived here.   Reimbursement payment in hand, we called the cleaning crew.  When they could finally get there, they were great.  Quick and efficient.  A deep sigh of relief.

Next, we hosted the plumbing crew, to address other related damage, and while they were at it, to upgrade the hookup for our washer and drier.  I moved more things, to accommodate the work they needed to do.  While they were here, we consulted with them on the advisability of installing either a French drain, or a sump pump, or possibly both.  When the plumbers left, I moved some more things around again, and although it felt like defeat, we nevertheless began shopping for drainage specialists.  We got a bid we thought reasonable, for the combined French drain/sump pump option, but because we weren't the only people impacted by this winter/spring water adventure, the  work couldn't be done until June.

June it was.  I once again moved things, to prepare for what seemed like a little reenactment of the scene in the street -- jackhammers and dirt, cement and digging, for three days I think it was.  I'd pledged to empty the basement completely, but only managed to clear out half of what was there.  These seasoned workers didn't mind.  They simply pushed everything that was left to the center of the room, draped it with a large sheet of plastic, and went about their business.  By mid-July, and just before the heat spell of 2010, they were finished.

We, of course, were not.

(Level Two to follow...)


© 2011  Walter Zimmerman