We knew several days ago from the weather forecast that we could get a lot of rain yesterday, but it was supposed to be 1-2 inches, not 10!
It didn’t start until after 3pm yesterday. During the afternoon rush at around 5pm it looked like a hurricane had descended upon us.
By 8:45pm there was 4.5″ in the rain gauge which I had to dump out because the gauge only holds 5 inches at a time. After another monsoon-sounding wave of rain arrived, I checked the gauge again and it showed 2 more inches—in just 15 minutes! That’s when the raging river on the side of our house started filling up the window well and shooting into the basement.
Thankfully we’ve done this drill before. I knew which items to move to higher ground, and my husband is an engineer and figured out a clever system to catch some of the water escaping the window well using some special flashing tape which funneled into buckets. That left some unruly water which flowed down one of the walls, but it made a giant puddle instead of the usual small stream.
The intense rain ended at about 10:30pm which allowed my husband to go outside and bail out the window well by hand. The rain continued to fall lightly throughout the night.
This morning I cautiously checked the basement floor. It’s dry! The bucket only has about an inch of water in it, so it rained gently enough to soak back into the ground overnight. Whew!
Our grand total for the 15-hour rain event was 10.25 inches!