Flood!!!

(The following posts span a few days, and were things that I posted to Praisebooking, so the tenses and formats may not be quite right for my blog, but I want to get this up and don't have time to fix everything to have it in the right perspective, so I hope it makes sense!)

Thursday 1/3, we woke up to freezing weather, -2 and by mid morning is had warmed up to a whopping 8 degrees! The nice thing was, the sun was shining and with all the snow that we had it made for a bright and beautiful day.

After all of the snow and cold that we had in the last week, Sunday it got up to 51 degrees and the snow turned to mush! The Sr. High youth group were supposed to go to MI to go tubing, (Echo Valley), but they were closed because of the warm temps so they had to cancel.

By Tuesday it got up into the low 60s, we had severe thunderstorms Monday evening as well as a tornado watch. (And a week ago we were under nearly 2 foot of snow!) Now that all of that snow has melted, the Elkhart River, which is behind the homes across the street, is nearing flood stage. Our neighborhood is known for water, sometimes up into the streets, but more often in people's basements. Our sump pump has been running extra times today so I know the water is starting to come in, but when the basement gets really wet it simply seeps up through the floor so there is nothing that the pump can do to stop that. One good thing is that our home is higher up than most of the other homes in our neighborhood so we usually have some warning since the neighbors start pumping water out of their basements before we get wet.

Well, we got the water, much to my disappointment. The boys and I spend quite a bit of time Tues. morning/afternoon picking everything up off of the floor in the basement, and trust me that was no small task. UGH!! There was a small river flowing from Mark's shop through the laundry room into the sump pump, which was dragging saw dust with it. How pretty! The water is just flowing in and I have no idea how bad it might get, but even this is too much for me. Normally, when this happens we only get an inch or just a couple, so hopefully this time won't be any worse than before. We have been very lucky and this is the first time we have had any water in the basement for a couple of years.

(Thursday morning…..) Wow, what a night we had last night! Adam drives to Awana since he comes from work, so goes home a bit earlier than us. Just as we were leaving church, Lori, my best friend who lives across from the church comes out and says that Adam has been trying to call me on my cell phone and to call him right away. Uh oh...has our pump given out while we were away? Do we have 3 feet of water in our basement? We continue on our way home and my cell phone won't work. ARG! I can see that Adam is still trying to call and now Lori is trying to call too, but I can't get anything else on my phone. How frustrating and what a tense ride home, not knowing what was going on. Thankfully, we are only about 10 minutes from church. We finally get home and Adam says the Red Cross has called and the police and/or firemen are going to be around our neighborhood in about 45 minutes to evacuate everyone and then they will turn off our electricity!! What?? Why in the world would they do that? Don't they know that those of us that aren't completely flooded out need the electricity to keep our pumps running so we won't be totally flooded out?? How crazy is this? So I went into panic mode...moderate panic mode, I guess you could say. Mark and the boys started bringing up stuff from the basement, especially his woodworking equipment since he has a lot of money wrapped up in that. So far those things had just been up on tables, but if they are going to turn off our electricity, who knows how much water we might get. Meanwhile, I see the firemen pull up in front of our house and I go out to see what is going on. They don't really know much about the evacuation or the electricity; they say they are just there to rescue those in the back of our neighborhood who truly are stranded. All of the neighbors started coming out of their homes, everyone trying to figure out what was going on and what we were going to do. In the midst of all of this, Lori called to see what was going on and assured me that if we did have to be evacuated that we had a place to stay, as our church has two empty parsonages right now and she had talked to Pastor and he said that was no problem at all. At least that was one less worry. After that our evening turned into a waiting game. We watched 3-4 fire/rescue vehicles come into our neighborhood, including the rescue boat. The neighbors all congregated in another neighbor's yard and one sweet friend, (Leah), even went into make coffee for all of us!! It ended up that we didn't have to evacuate or have our electricity turned off, thank the Lord! They were only going to turn the electricity off in those homes where they had rescued the people that they knew were all ready flooded out and the electricity could cause a problem. About 10:30 everyone decided to go home and pray that our pumps all ran through the night and nothing else happened. Mark decided to take part of the day off from work today since he still had some personal days to take and is at Lowes right now to buy a new pump…just in case. Ours has held up so far, but it has run constantly for at least 36 hours and we are worried that it is going to die. Several other neighbors have had this problem and have gotten more water in their basements.