The Great Flood

The night of May 6th, 2010 changed the direction of the basement entirely.  I'd only been asleep for about two hours when my daughter came in and woke me up.

"Daddy," she said.  "I think there's someone in the house.  I hear a loud, scary noise."

At first I thought she was dreaming.  It had been raining like crazy when I went to bed, and I figured she had heard some distant thunder.

I walked her back to bed, and as I did, I heard the noise: BOOM.  Twenty seconds later:  BOOM.

Soaked

I'd never heard anything like that, so I proceeded with caution.  It was a deep, acoustic, bass sound that seemed to shake the walls. It could've been an intruder trying to rip the TV off the wall.  As I crept down the stairs, I could tell that it was coming from the basement.   I went down the basement stairs, flipped on the light, and put one foot on the ground.  Splash.  I looked down at my foot, and water was bubbling around it in the carpet.  The sound came again, this time very loud:  BOOM.  Suddenly it all my sense.  It was my subwoofer shorting out because it was submerged in water.

Speakers submerged in water

The entire north end of the basement was absolutely soaked in water.  We'd had a little bit of water show up the previous spring, but nothing like this.  It was almost an inch deep, stretching from the north wall to the stairway.

Right away I began to unplug everything and move as much as I could away from the wet area.  The game room thankfully was dry, so I started to pile all the couches, speakers, and wet blankets in that room.  An hour later, I tried to go back up and go to sleep.  It was still raining.

The next day I woke up and went to assess the situation.  I pulled out our steam cleaner and tried to suck up the water through the carpet, but I would fill up the gallon capacity in 20 seconds, then have to dump it and start again.  This went on for hours with no sign that I was nearing the end.  It seemed as if the more I sucked, the more water seemed to come up from the ground.  Stranger still, it didn't appear that the walls were wet or the source of the water.



Carpet gone.  Wet pad.

 After a full 8 hours of this, I finally gave up and decided to rip back the carpet.  I didn't want to do it, but the more I thought about it, there was no salvaging the carpet.  It was bound to rot and smell moldy in that basement.  I also needed to discover the source of the water, and that meant clearing the carpet.  So, it got hauled away.

Determining the source of the water

As I examined the floor, there was no obvious source of a leak.  But there were a few very tiny cracks that ran through the concrete, and coincidentally, these areas corresponded with the heaviest amounts of water saturation in the carpet.

It seemed that the water was coming up from these cracks, although I couldn't imagine why, since that would mean that water was under the house.  You'd think it would come in from the walls, wouldn't you?

Water soaked walls & carpet strips

We put in a call to the insurance company who recommended that we get a water removal company out immediately.  By the time we contacted someone, I had already done most of the work sucking up the water and tearing out the carpet.  Nevertheless, they set up massive fans and dehumidifiers to suck the remaining water that might've been left in the walls out.  At this point, the major concern to the future of the basement was not allowing black mold to set in on the walls.  The company would leave these massive machines running all day, but they would short out our electrical box from all the power they were drawing.

On the third day after the flood, it began raining again, HARD.  Once again, water came up at the same spot, though not as heavily this time.  I was able to see pools of water form around the tiny cracks in the floor.  It was reassuring to find the source, but because the second flooding happened days after the first, we had to file a second insurance claim and pay another deductible.  At least insurance ended up writing us a check for the cost of the carpet and drywall.

So the basement was officially on hold.  Just two months after completing the game room, it was now jammed with all the couches and treadmill from the media room.  And a conscious decision was made that there would be no renovation until we knew where the water was coming from and how to fix it.