I went out to pick up a few last minute items yesterday afternoon for my upcoming trip. It was still sunny when I got in my car, but I didn’t even make it to the ATM before it started raining. When I say rain, I really mean torrential downpour.
I went a number of places for errands including the Sports Authority and Michaels (the craft place). By the time I got to Michaels, the rain was coming down so hard I could barely see in front of me while I walked across the parking lot. By walk I mean sprint as fast as the sandals I was wearing would allow me. Inside, there were a couple of aisles with trash buckets in the middle to catch leaks from the ceiling, which I found a little amusing. After about a half hour or so of waiting for the rains to die down a little, about half the lights in Michaels went out and I decided it would be best to check out while they still had some power. I sprinted out to my car in the heavy rains after I was done. It was pretty bad, I saw a loose cart in the parking lot being whipped about by the wind and go straight into the side of a car. Glad it wasn’t mine. On my way home, I saw police cruisers blocking off streets that had cars in them with water up to their headlights.
The closer I got to home, the more nervous I got so I dropped a call to one of my roommates to check on the basement to check for flooding. He said he had checked about an hour ago and there wasn’t a drop on the floor. Mind you, it had been raining now for maybe 2 hours. I got home about 15 minutes later and Chris went downstairs with me to check on it. Since we had no power, we had no lights or anything down there. As Chris stepped off the last step, we heard a splash followed my much cursing.
We went back upstairs to tell Mike, who also lives in the basement. Then we got a couple flashlights and starting hauling stuff out of rooms that was damaged or going to be shortly. I would say there was about 3 inches of standing water. Within about an hour or so we had 3 dry vac’s ready to go, but we couldn’t start doing anything until the power came back on. For the next 3 hours, Chris, Mike and I sat in the living room asking each other trivia questions from a deck of trivia cards we found from 1984 by flashlight. Beforehand, Chris was taking a nap, Mike was reading magazines and I was futilely playing with a Rubik’s cube while we waited for the vac’s to come. It was utterly amazing how boring it was with no electricity.
When the power finally came back on, we all ran downstairs to check on everything. Bobby came over and helped us with the vacuums and we started a 3 hour long cleaning frenzy. Shortly after, Eddy and Linda came to help. We had 3 mops and 2 vacuums going constantly cleaning up water. One of the vacs actually had a leak so it was really just displacing water. I stayed up til about 2am mopping my room so I could sleep down here. Mike slept on a couch upstairs. With the dehumidifier going last night, the temperature in my room hit 86 degrees.
Needless to say, I didn’t get a ton of sleep. I’m working from home today and cleaning up what I can.
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