Drying Out - The Basement Flood of 2018

Once in a Blue Moon


The mighty Hudson has not breached its banks, and the Normanskill still remains a good 60 feet below the level of 173, but let me tell you - twice in the past week the heavens opened and doused us with monsoon rains!


That's a picture just a few short blocks from 173 - scary!  We were fortunate here though, only the basement got flooded.  Fortunately, in 21 years here at 173, this is only the second (maybe the 3rd, I'm not sure) time the basement took on water.  By the time I got home from work yesterday there was no standing water, but water marks on stuff in the basement show the water raised to about 4 inches.  I think the reason there was no standing water when I got home is because back in '99 we put a new concrete floor in the basement with drainpipes throughout.  Of course that was in the ancient pre-blog days when I rarely took before pictures (drat).  

It is possible to take the story of Noah figuratively, although virtually every Near East ancient civilization has its own version of the flood story (including the amoral epic of Gilgamesh). - Ben Shapiro

Another fortunate thing is that since re-doing the basement in '14, I've been rather diligent about not leaving things on the floor.  As a result, I don't think much has been lost!  Here's a couple shots of where we are now:


In the upper left in the picture above you can see the boiler.  When the new floor went in back in '99, we raised the boiler a bit.  Good thing!  Very lucky the pilot was still lit!  Only wish I had raised it even more, and that may be a project to do yet! 


Everything's been moved to one side of the basement, so it looks much worse than it is!


And of course every fan in the house is down there now!


The workshop fared okay, but there's gonna be a lotta cleanup to do!  The laundry room survived relatively ok, again fortunately the appliances are raised, also a product of the '99 floor install!


 Beyond that white door in the background there is the cold cellar - that'll get the fans next.Weird...al I have is a couple black and white shots from a few years ago:


I guess it's a bit appropo though - it's a fairly dark room and nothing much to look at.  Although, I did put a new floor in a few years back.  Here's another look:


As a matter of fact, I should do a legacy post on replacing the cold cellar floor!  Anyway, the weather here has been crazy this week, and I get nervous right now when I look outside:


Those clouds look like they're creeping around the corner - or I'm just paranoid about it now!  
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