My Flooded Basement Experience

My brush with a flooded basement was a very unfortunate incident which caused a great deal of time and money to put back to normal again. What started as a minor inconvenience involving leaked pipes in the room directly above the basement, turned out to be a major flooded basement disaster.

Due to the nature of my dad's job (he is a pastor for an evangelical Christian church), we had to move every so often to a new neighborhood. In many cases, before we could get all of our things unpacked and placed where they should be, it would be time to move again. For this reason, the house basement usually served as a storage area for stuff that we haven't had time to unpack yet. Usually, we only took out things that were really needed on a daily basis, and left the rest for another time where we would have the luxury of sorting through everything. This usually meant not in the near future. My mom, aside from actively helping my dad in church activities, also had a full time teaching load in the church owned school so I and my two siblings also took part in the household chores to help them.

So even while we were not doing a regular inspection of that part of the house, from time to time while putting or getting something from there, we would notice a small puddle of water sometimes pooled at the corner part of the basement. Neophytes as we were in the flooded basement department, we never thought to check why all the water was getting through and where it all came from. Usually the water accumulated was just small enough not to cause harm to the things stored there, so after removing the water with a dry rag and some mopping, we just forget about it. I usually made a mental note to ask my dad to check it out, but simply forgot to tell him about it when I had the opportunity.

One time, there was a church activity involving church members in another city to come to our place. It was a weekend activity and the visitors had to stay overnight. Naturally, some of them were housed in our place while many of the young people preferred to sleep in tents in the church grounds. Because of this, the bathroom in the house was going into 'overtime' work accommodating the shower needs of all these transient friends.

Chances are, the leaked water pipe, severely corroded, completely gave way and burst at that time. What made matters really take a turn for the worst, was the fact that we only found out about it after more than a week later. We really couldn't tell for sure, but judging from the state of the now flooded basement, the dripping water, well more like "cascading", had been going on unnoticed for quite some time already. Going inside the flooded basement meant fully submerging your feet and part of the legs into the water, and having to put up with the stale odor and the humid air besides. Many of our things still stored there were soaked and damaged, some beyond restoration already.

Seeing as the flooded basement was now further past anything our repair abilities could manage, we had to call a water damage company to send a flooded basement professional to make assessments and do the necessary water removal, dehumidification, and plumbing repairs as soon as possible.

That was one experience I wouldn't care to repeat.

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