In the Time of the (Basement) Flood

Sometimes, timing can shift the shock of life challenges. What can feel like devastation can become an opportunity.

Last week, our area endured pounding rain. I anxiously checked our basement in Katonah for dampness. Wednesday looked normal. Thursday morning I was lugging down the traditional load of laundry when I saw rippling waves shining at the bottom of the stairs. I yelped and stumbled back upstairs. My partner Naomi and I raced down to gauge the extent of flooding. Estimate: 3-4 inches across the whole basement. My look at the storage room where I keep writing examples, research materials, records and books both relieved and shocked me. Many materials were in sturdy plastic bins, records were on a table—but a cardboard box with tax returns and legal papers was a solid soggy mass. Plastic bags with hundreds of pages of printouts, including unpublished novels, were soaked. And my only electronic copies for the novels were waterlogged 3.5 inch memory disks that went out of style in Y2K.

Naomi immediately called John Hobby Jr. Plumbing & Heating, who are old hands at pulling our plumbing nuts out of the fire. I feared they were swamped with calls from flooded homeowners and it could be days before they could come over. But no! Our timing was fantastic. Within 60 minutes a Hobby squad arrived in their distinctive red van. They pumped out the water and replaced the sump pump, which had given up the ghost in the wake of too much rain. Meanwhile, Naomi contacted First Response, to get the drying process started (that’s First Response as in the remediation company for home cleanups, not pregnancy tests). Again, I thought the process would take days. Instead, Vinnie the project manager arrived as the plumbers were leaving.

Vinnie assessed the situation with a practiced eye. The next morning, his crew arrived with industrial-strength dehumidifiers and fans that we moved around the basement from Friday through Tuesday. While I tossed some stuff, I decided to try to dry out tax papers and research materials. Every couple of hours I probed the depths of my wet papers. I saw progress, as I rotated files in front of the roaring equipment. Gradually, materials dried, even if they are permanently crinkled.

But wait, there’s more! A big part of cleanups involve brawn. As fate would have it, Thursday afternoon we had a visit from Naomi’s nephew Ian, who was visiting the area. Ian, you should know, is a 30-something commercial fishing boat and tugboat captain from Alaska (and the brother of remarkable Alaska back-country athlete Ben Americus, who makes terrifying videos of his adventures). Ian arrived to see us at just the time when we could use a strong, rugged Alaskan to move heavy cartons, flatten boxes and make the clean-up process vastly easier. Otherwise, Naomi and I would have struggled to move, flatten and throw out things, given our status as two increasingly creaky baby boomers.

When we told Ian the sump pump broke, he felt our pain. “On a fishing boat we always have multiple sump pumps,” he said. That sounds prudent for a vessel sailing the roiling icy waters off the Bering Strait. 

By Monday my materials were dry enough to leave the basement. First Response picked up their gear on Tuesday. We switched immediately to washing laundry, including every towel we own.

I know the recovery could have been much slower and messier, had the timing not gone our way. If plumbers and remediators weren’t available, if the rain kept coming, if Ian was out wrestling with giant tunas in Alaska. And the opportunity from the flood: the clean-up turbocharged our decluttering efforts. The basement never looked and smelled better!

This afternoon I looked over my mostly dry papers, 20 to 30 years old. I’m trying to smooth them out. This time around I’ll be smart and store them in plastic bins, away from any watery threat. As an obsessive self-chronicler, I’m not going to let something like a basement flood keep me from my materials. There’s still literary gold in those stained, slightly soggy pages. From the grit of the flood comes the essay.