Time to Build an Ark

It started raining on Friday. Just a light sprinkle. I actually went for a little run after dropping the kids off at school. It was nice and refreshing. After I got home it started raining a bit harder, and harder and then it was pouring. It rained and rained and rained. When we woke up on Saturday morning the ground had already had enough. Even though the rain wasn't coming down hard anymore there still was no place for the new moisture to go. And thus the problems began. We noticed that water was beginning to pool in our backyard. We checked out our front yard and realized we had a situation! The water was completely covering our cul-de-sac and came up in our yard well past the sidewalk. AND IT WAS STILL RAINING!

Parker decided to rescue his soccer goal before it floated down-stream.

This is the view from our house up to the main street. It looked like a lake!

This is the view from our neighbors yard.

While we were fortunate enough not to have water leaking into our basement, that was not the case for everyone on our street. Our neighbors had an issue with rain water filling up their basement window wells causing water to leak into their basement. We spent about an hour and a half dipping buckets of water out of the window wells and depositing the water onto their lawn. It kept the situation at bay, but if you stopped it filled right back up. At one point I feared that we might be doing this all day, and then Reid showed up with a PUMP! He stuck it in the well and voila! all the water was pumped out in a matter of minutes. I'm glad he showed up but was secretly wishing he had made an appearance an hour earlier!

Here were are, looking like drowned rats! But, the basements stayed DRY!

After the boys got the window wells under control, our attention shifted to that of our children. Here you will see water running into our neighbors side yard looking for the french drain. Too bad it didn't realize that the drain had no where to drain to. Everything was so saturated and full that there was no place for the water to go. So what did it do? It created a swimming pool!

The kids got on their swimming suits and blew up the rafts! They had a great time!

Luckily the water levels went down by the end of the day. We had quite a parade of city vehicles on our street working to get this situation under control. Hopefully they will find the root of the problem and can fix it so that this doesn't happen the next time we get a big rain. Although the kids are likely to be disappointed, our basements will appreciate it!