And then the rain came....

It rained for 40 days and 40 nights when Noah built the ark, but we barely made it through one day and one night of steady rain.

Between Easter and June 16th, we had received about 22 inches of rain in this area. Give or take.  It wasn't all at once - it came every couple of days apart.  It seemed like every cloud that passed over dumped at least an inch, or sometimes two.  And every rain brought more water into the basement. We were never really able to make it stop - we only "controlled" it by vacuuming up every 4 hours  - the sump pump drained about every 10-20 minutes - and we basically moved anything out of the way that was going to get wet.  Or so we thought.

About 11:00 at night, on June 16th, the rain started again.  We knew we were in for another downpour, but it seemed almost "normal" now.  We went to bed and listened to the rain and the wind and the thunder all night long.  Not just a steady rain - but a HEAVY, steady rain....without letting up at all - it poured ALL night.

We got up around 6:30 the next morning, it was still raining - and I fully expected to see the garden under water and the fruit trees in the back to be sitting in water etc....  But I never thought I would ever see what I saw that morning.  We live on a bit of a hill on our street and at the bottom of the hill is a little orange house that sits next to a very large drainage ditch.  Every spring, this ditch fills up and flows away from town through a culvert at the end of our street.  Here's what I saw when I looked out our kitchen window towards that house.



The water had filled the ditch, and was running over the road....       

                                                            

                                                                                                

Turns out, I couldn't get out of town that day to get to work.....there wasn't one road leaving town that wasn't covered with water!   They all looked like this:              (and it was STILL raining!)           

The first flood

 The first day we noticed water on the floor was April 13th.  Kerry had been asked to go help "babysit" the town pumphouse. (kinda sounds like a bar!) There was fear that the river was going to swell so bad, it would fill the pump house and/or take it right down.  Volunteers worked all day to sand bag around it, and then they asked for volunteers to take night shifts in case the water rose more in the night.  Just as he was leaving for his shift, I stepped in a puddle of water by the fireplace.  We thought maybe it was just how the snow was melting between us and the neighbours, so I went out and shovelled as much as I could away from the house.  What a waste of energy!
By morning the water was under the couch and spreading towards the fireplace.  This picture below is when we had to bust a hole in the floor in order to get a sump pump in.



Here you can see where the water level was.

Kerry and I both missed work this day and Drew stayed home from school to help.  We worked ALL day to get this thing installed and I vacuumed up water, non-stop, all day. 

It took a few days - but by that weekend, the water was now in Drew's room, coming in faster than the sump pump could ever keep up.

This is in the laundry room - you can see what it was doing to the cement already!

Fuzzy white lime stuff EVERYWHERE!  They say it isn't harmful but man did it track through the house when you walked on it!

Some of the damage in Drew's room.

It was just coming in everywhere - not your basic "seepage".

In the end, our whole basement looked like this and the cement just started to crumble more and more.

and to picture the snow....

Our walking "path"!!





The Popcorn Stand - hard to believe that Niki and I worked there this summer one day and it was SO hot the candy was melting!  I think it was 37 or 38 degrees that day!



The road to the graveyard.....I tried to walk out there a few times, but it was a little difficult!

Codie's car after a dump one night - not sure how much we got, but it was unbelievable! Snow was gone by the next day!

Ryder had some problems getting around!

More Flood Pictures

Just to give you and idea what kind of water we had laying around....... all of these pictures are actually BEFORE the big flood in June.  These are only from the spring melt off from all the snow!

That's a train track (bridge) out there.  I remember sitting on there as a kid and watching the boys go fishing - the water is generally about 10 feet from the bottom of the bridge.

A whirlpool out by the spillway - the water was running down the culvert and into the spillway here.

This was the driveway going into Bourassa's.  Totally wiped it right out!

Ya think??

This is the road to Ceylon.

This is a very rare sight - no one in this area has ever seen this happen.  It's actually a dam for the dam! The water running over at the top of this picture has never ran like this before - usually it flows over to the actual spillway at the bottom of the picture.

This is a picture of "Tommy Douglas".  I pass by this statue everyday on my way to work.  He stands facing Highway 13 from the North Side of the road and in the middle of total chaos one day, someone must have felt sorry for him so they dressed him up in this life jacket.  The water at this point was getting dangerously close to him - and as I post pictures later on, you'll see what I'm talking about.  This picture was taken on June 21st, 2011 - about 4 days after the BIG rain where we received up to 5 inches of rain in one night.  Thats the rain that did the most damage.