The Flood!!

OMFG!!!

Our TV has broken again!, and so last night I went down into the basement to get a cable for a TV I borrowed from work....

The basement was a foot deep in water!!!

All the houses (well many) in PEI have these sump pumps in the basements that kick in every now and then to drain away water.
We live on Spring Street, aptly named because it's on a spring. As such the spring pushes water up through the earth and into our basement, the sump pump keeps it drained - this happens all the time. During the cold and snow it was less often, and I guess this was because the water was frozen and therefore didn't seep so much, but now, with hot weather and rain this thing is getting filled quickly. The pipe that drains things away broke a few weeks ago and we were nearly flooded then, but Glen came and we though it was fixed. This was over a week ago, I've not been down in the basement since he fixed it, and to my horror, the sump pump had somehow fallen and the ball thing was stuck on the earth, so the switch never kicked in and the water kept rising!!

Thankfully I caught it just as it was lapping the boards that I have our stuff on - I never quite trusted it, and the ground is constantly wet so everything is raised off of the floor on paint cans an board or whatever. This time however the water had made it over one of the boards.

Panic, struck in as we thought about how we'd have to evacuate all of our stuff.
The buggy was deep in it and one box was destroyed which had our tent and camping stuff in it. Luckily I guess it's only been wet for a couple of days and so we unrolled it and aired it and it dried today fine.
It took over an hour to drain the basement which was easily a foot deep at one end, and I apologise for not having a picture but in my panic and work effort to evacuate things it wasn't until all was calm that I said to Kath, 'I should have taken a picture of that for my blog!' :)
So nothing got damaged, but given another day of water rise and we would have lost many things that are too much to store in the house.
This house has not loft and so the basement is the only place to store stuff + we brought a 3 bedroom house and stuffed it into a 2 bedroom, so you can imagine how cluttered it would be without storage, and any of you who read my blog back in February when my stuff initially arrived would know.


So now we have decided to keep our stuff out of the basement altogether, but this means stuffing it into every available space.

It's not ideal really :(
But we spent £4000 bringing our stuff over here, and I don't want it wrecked because of this damned sump pump business.