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Home Is Where Your Bed Is
When Water Doesn’t Go Down The Drain
Nearly a month ago, after a serious rainstorm when just over 8" fell within 24 hours, many houses in my community had water come up their basement drains and, for some, their basement toilets, too. Some had a few inches of mostly stormwater that came up but quickly receded. For others, they received feet of sewage.
While we were fortunate that we had some stormwater, it remained for nearly half a week. Once that our plumber did some critical work, only then did the water start to drain. We feel that the heavy volume of stormwater was a primary contributor to the malfunctioning drain, Up until that rainstorm incident, in our 11 years in the house, ANY there wasn’t a single incident of EVER water coming up the basement drain. We were very worried because most of our neighbors’ water already receded or had been pumped.
Harder To Breathe
Very quickly, we could tell that there was something wrong with the air inside our house. We couldn’t go inside without coughing. Between that first morning after to when the plumber started work, whenever we went into our house, my wife and I made sure to wear N95 masks.
To make it worse, we couldn’t run our AC (air conditioning). First, the basement furnace was partially submerged, so there wasn’t a way to safely test it. Also, the air ducts needed to be cleaned. As a result of these and other factors, it was impossibly hot and humid inside our house. I’m guessing that it was well over 80° in our house and the humidity was well over 80% (if not higher). There came a point between the air and the humidity that we decided to temporarily leave our house, while it was getting fixed.
Hard To Find Better Days
It’s situationally ironic that, prior to the storm event, I watched a lot of YouTube videos about nomad living: living and working in a voluntary, location independent manner. The key word is voluntary. In our case, there was nothing voluntary. It hurt to leave the home that we love very much. I can’t think that many people would ever think that any of this would ever happen to them. In the beginning, we were limited by what couldn’t happen (yet), which challenged our collective patience. It both helped and unsettled us to go online and read about others’ situations. There were still…
