The great flood

Well here we are some days after the great flood. No arks floated down my street, but that almost seems surprising. We were extremely fortunate and clearly God had a hand in making sure we didn't flood our completely finished basement.

I had planned on leaving Thursday to go to Michigan with Kelsey and her friend Robyn. We decided to leave around 3 (or was it 3:30?). The storms hit around 3:00 and by 3:15 pm on August 23, we were without power. Lately that hasn't been an unusual occurrence. Oh look, there goes a goose overhead, better get ready to lose power. See a cloud? Get ready for a power loss. It is becoming a repeat of when we first moved to Palatine over 17 years ago. At that time we would lose power all the time and our basement would flood pretty regularly. Back then I bought a larger 5000 watt generator complete with a transfer switch. A transfer switch is something an electrician wires into your house wiring and in the advent of a power failure, when the generator starts automatically, some subset of the circuits in your house switch over to the generator automatically. When power returns, the circuits switch back to the main power lines and the generator shuts off.

Well due to procrastination, being cheap, and Commonwealth Edison cleaning up their act a bit so the power situation got better so we never installed the generator. In fact it has only been started once in the last 15+ years to show a potential buyer that it worked. As well we did a lot of work on regrading parts of the yard and having a waterproofer fix the improperly poured concrete floor in our basement. Instead of being poured on top of pea gravel on top of the footing, the floor was poured directly on the footing. Thus the water as it finds its way to our foundation now has a choice to make. It can either flow under the basement floor and eventually to our sump to be pumped outside, or it can flow above the basement floor and get our belongings wet. So before finishing our basement we had a waterproofer come out and remove 6" of basement floor around the entire perimeter of the basement and place a drainage system in the space where the pea gravel should have been. Thank you so much Palatine building inspectors for allowing the builder to get away with this.


So by 3:30 or 4:00 its become clear that the battery for our battery backup sump pump is on its last legs. My fault for not replacing it sooner. Fortunately the neighbors across the street still have power. In fact that is pretty typical. We lose power much more frequently than they do, which is something I would love Commonwealth Edison to explain as the entire development has underground utilities. Oh well, a battle for another day. Stringing together some extension cords allows us to hook our sump pump up to the neighbors power and life is good, if not hot as the temperature outside is still as high as the humidity.

Then the situation gets much worse. Our neighbors across the street lose power. Now we have no power to operate our sump pump and with all the rains over the last few weeks, water is pouring into the sump pit at a pretty good rate. So I pull the battery from our Grand Caravan and hook it up temporarily to our battery backed up sump. I also then realize that this is not a long term solution, so head out in Kelsey's Focus to buy a small portable generator as I have little confidence in the big old generator sitting in a corner of our garage that hasn't been used as long as we've owned it. Encountering horrible traffic on virtually every road headed North to get to Home Depot I finally head up Rohlwing only to find it cover in water. Stupidly I press on and pull onto the bike trail that is 6" or so above the road. By the grace of God I make it through after only stalling twice. Lesson learned, if the road is covered with water, find another route. But desperation will cause you to make silly decisions.

I get to Home Depot and of course they have been sold out of generators for a while, duh! I then head to West Marine and pick up a smaller than desired marine deep cycle battery (all their larger ones had already been sold). Once back home, I hook it up and then start working on the generator in the garage. With the help of Scott and Robyn we get it onto the back porch and I get to work on figuring out how to hook it up.

After wiring a couple of electrical boxes with outlets in them to the generator and bringing up the Grand Caravan battery to the generator, we're ready to try starting it. Thankfully the generator starts right up and we can now power the sump pump and the battery backup with the generator.

While this has been going on, our other neighbors across the street have been hand bailing the water out of their sump pit to keep their basement from flooding as they are also without power. So now we reverse the extension cords and bring power from our generator over to their sump pump. Also during this time, our next door neighbor heads out to try and get our across the street neighbors a generator or battery as their battery had also failed, which was why they were hand bailing. Fortunately for them, a couple of hours later, their power is restored and they are in good shape save for some seepage that got their basement carpet wet.

Although I finally get some sleep that night, it's rather fitful as I'm not comfortable just letting the generator run without being watched. Fortunately the flow of water into our sump pit as diminished to the point where the battery backup sump pump is having no difficulty keeping up nor running very often to make me concerned about flooding. Finally at 6:00 pm or so the next evening our power is restored and life can get back to normal after 27 hours without power.

The real miracle in all this is that I shouldn't have been home when all this happened and the way our neighborhood pulled together to help each other out!