Monday, July 12, 2010

Lessons learned

First, it turns out Boston got between two to four inches of rain in that 30 minute monsoon. You can see pictures of water elsewhere in the city here. I don’t know that we got four inches but I’d bet it was more than two just based on how fast the lower level of the patio filled up. I didn’t take a picture of it (I was a little busy), but the gnome we use to keep the gate open was almost entirely covered.

After we flooded last October, I’d told Kent that the pet carriers had to be stored in a specific spot in the closet under the front sidewalk. That closet doesn’t have a door and the spot I wanted to put the carriers is easy to access even if it’s dark and things are crazy/confused. So Saturday it was very easy to get the carriers out, grab the cats (who were already huddled in our bedroom—they know the drill) and shove them in.

I also didn’t waste any time speculating that we wouldn’t take on water. We were both still in slippers and I told Kent he better get some shoes on ASAP. And as I ran around getting cats where they belonged, I also picked up laptop bags and moved them to higher ground. I knew right where my passport was, plus my check book and immediately put those sorts of things in my bag.

I did cry a bit while I was moving things and shoving furniture further away from the water, but I didn’t freak out at all and I kept working.

Now we need to solve the problem. As part of that, Kent’s looking at ways we can re-grade the parking lot behind us. While we don’t own a spot there, others in our building do and right now it’s graded to slope down toward us. Obviously that just creates more run off which is why we ended up with water on Saturday. The drain by our back door does work but we’d have needed about five of those to handle that much rain. Unfortunately we may need to pay for this since (a) our condo association already needs to pay to have the building tuck-pointed as a result of the nor’easter we had in March and (b) there’s not enough money to pay for that. I’m not thrilled about shelling out OUR money for condo repairs but I sure as hell do not want any more water in our apartment.

1 comment:

Jeanne said...

It is truly awful to live in a place where you start to get afraid of rain. We had some flooding problems downstairs (where our books are) and it was incredibly demoralizing--you feel like your house isn't safe anymore, somehow. I was reading Stephen Baxter's SF book entitled Flood yesterday and thinking of you.