Floods

The flooding on Saturday was horrible--and we were some of the lucky ones. Although we had heard there was a tropical storm coming, we honestly did not pay much attention to it as there are a slew of tropical storms and typhoons each year. We did not think this would be any different and in fact were already dressed to go out when the rain started falling harder.


By early afternoon the water was coming into the house. All in all we got about three feet of water on the first floor. Our fridge floated (it never really occurred to me that a fridge would float). We were able to move a lot of items upstairs and really the only damage we had was loss of everything in our fridge (flood water got inside) and a lot of our cabinet doors no longer open or in some cases no longer shut. A woman a block away from us drowned and a young man on that same street was bitten by a snake. We really were okay. Once we moved everything upstairs, we hunkered down for the evening. We never lost electricity (actually people told me later that it is best to turn off the electricity in a flood--we had no idea).

As you can see, in the beginning we were really optimistic. We stacked items up higher until it became apparent we were going to get some serious water in the house. That is when we switched to bringing everything upstairs.

This is about the highest point of the water in our front yard. It got to about above the waist. Outside in front of our garage, the water on the street was already above the head, while outside of our gate, it was about neck high.

Our friend's daughter could not get back into her dorm (streets were flooded) so she came here. Since our street was already flooded at that point, she went through the neighbors house, climbed a ladder over the fence and scaled a small roof to get on to our balcony. Our house was the last house on the street to get flooded (we live on a slight hill).

Neighbors just four houses down from us and water reached their second level. Some neighbors a block away who were trying to locate to owners of a dog that ended up at their house during the flood ended up with water on their second floor. We were really, really lucky.

The Start....

The Flood....

The Aftermath.....