Hurricane Ike comes to town

It's not often that a hurricane visits our part of the country, so we don't often see the huge rains that the Gulf and Atlantic states get to enjoy this time of year. On Sunday, we had an exception. The remnants of hurricane Ike roared through the Midwest dumping quite a bit of rain in less than a day. We've only been in this house for a year, but our neighbors said this is the most rain they've seen in the 50+ years they've been here.

This spot in the yard collects standing water in any heavy rainfall, but this is a bigger puddle than most. I don't think we should locate the pool quite so close to the house...


The rain is still coming down in this shot taken before 8:30 AM. Kinda reminds me of a rice paddy...

The garage site was not ignored by the rainfall either. I've got a better shot below of the rain inside the foundation. It's a good thing styrofoam doesn't mind being wet.

If only our downspout were this efficient. As it is, the gutter typically overflows more water than what goes down the downspot. Hopefully that will change when we replace the gutter.



We even had standing water in the front yard and on the side between our house and the neighbor's. I don't recall seeing standing water in the front before.

Having trouble seeing how much rain is in the gauge? That's because the gauge is full! The gauge had 2.5 inches the day before when I looked at it, but I didn't empty it at the time because the rain was still coming down. As of 8:30 Sunday morning, we had over 4.5 inches more. Only the Lord knows how much rain we actually received...

Here's a better shot of the new garage with the rain helping to compact the gravel. Notice how easy it is to see how level the concrete blocks are...

One more shot of the lake in the backyard with something unusual in the background... our neighbors have their back door open while it's raining. After taking this picture, I went to their house and found all three of them bailing water out of the basement. We quickly got our family in action, and spent the day removing the water. Since the water was as much as 4 inches deep in places we employed buckets and pumps initially, and finally worked our way down to squeegees and vacuum cleaners. Carpet covers the floor in most of the rooms, including a thick shag with a pad underneath in the largest room. The other rooms cleaned up pretty well, but it was a lot of work to get the water out of the shag carpet. The video below illustrates why Karen (and the rest of us) were tired at the end of the day.