Zee Flood

 I have been promising this for a little while, so here goes. At the end of May, we had a flood. Now, we have only owned our 40 year old house for two years, it is nowhere near any of the city's 3 rivers, and so we never really saw this coming. We had a small flood at the end of April that affected some of our basement, but we were able to get all of the water out through some suction and dehumidifiers.

After the first flood, we had a plumber and our foundation guy look at the systems in the house. The plumber (growl) found nothing wrong with the plumbing system (more on that later) and said it was a foundation issue. We then called our foundation guy, who came and looked at our foundation and didnt see an issue. He said putting in a trench could help, so we did that and the next several rain storms everything was fine.

We then went on a cruise at the end of May for our 2nd anniversary. We watched the news a bit while on the cruise, so we knew the Midwest had gotten slammed with storms, especially Joplin. I was actually considering having my husband drop me in Joplin so I could help, but then I got sick on the cruise. When we got to the mouth of the Mississippi River on May 25th, at around 10, I texted the girl watching our house and my mom to find out how the weather at been. At that point, everything was fine in our home.

The next morning we decided, instead of staying in New Orleans for an additional night as we had planned, that since I was miserable I needed to get home. About 4 hours into the drive, we got a call from home, saying that our house was flooded. We kind of thought (and hoped) it was just a small flood like we had in April. Not.So.Much.

 

 The above 3 pictures were the first pictures I got from my mom in the immediate aftermath. Its kind of hard to see how deep the water was at this point... (We were 9 hours away from home at this point. and I had a fever already.)

Taken by my husband's mom.

You can see my father in law's foot is basically covered by the water here. Yes, it was apparently this bad.


So, the short story here is, we had a group of wonderful family and friends that came and got all of our stuff out of the basement, and put into various other places in our home. My poor cat (He is the black, white and brown one in the pic at the top) got moated by the flood as well. And then we got to stew over whether our homeowner's insurance was going to pay. They did, by the way. This is because (remember that plumber) our flood ended up being classified as a E3 water loss. This basically means it was a sewer backup. In our flood in April, I was convinced something was wrong with our sewer system. But since the drains were all dry, I was ignored. Well, in this flood, water continued to come in for 2 days. This is because the insurance told us they wouldnt send anyone out until the water started coming in, but they also didnt advise us to use a plumber of any kind. After 2 days, I was like fine, lets just call a plumber. They fixed the water coming in problem in about 25 minutes, and it turned out it was due to roots in our sewer system. This is a common problem in older homes.

So, whats the moral here? IF YOU HAVE A HOME THAT IS OLDER THAN (WHO KNOWS) GET YOUR SEWER SYSTEM CHECKED! We seriously ran into several friends that had this same problem after determining what our problem was, and it was homes mostly older than 10 years with trees that were getting up in age on the property. So thats my little bit of advise for today. Get your sewer system checked. I even have a fantastic sewer specialist whose number I can give to you if you are in the Fort Wayne area.