The Flood!!!

A view of our flooded backyard...

We are just lucky that we were home and not on vacation on the night of Thursday, August 23. We had a little more rain than normal (about 5 inches in 24 hours) and rain was starting to collect in our backyard - nothing that hadn't happened before. Water started creeping into Eric's room about 7:00 - something that had also occurred before. Eric was keeping up with the water by using the shop-vac. I was still recovering from a cold, so I took NyQuil about 9:00 p.m. My mom came into my room about 11:00 and told me what was been going on - the water in the backyard was rising and our neighbors were helping put sandbags around our house to try to stop the water. I rolled back over and fell asleep; but not for very long, because at 1:00 in the morning, my mom came and got me to help get as much stuff upstairs as we could. It turns out that the Kishwaukee River, not far from our house, crested and was flooding all around our block. We spent the next 3 hours salvaging as much furniture and stuff as we could before the water rose too high. We got almost everything out of the boys' rooms (beds, dressers, desks) and a few other major pieces of furniture throughout the rest of the basement.

Pics of the basement after the water receded.
Notice the bubbly carpet - it had been (for the most part) floating!!!

This is everything the city hauled away for us.

The hardest part for me was when I started grabbing as many of our photo albums as I could. The water was rising faster - up to my ankles in 15 minutes - and as I watched my family bring everything that we could upstairs, prioritizing what needed to come up first, and thinking about how difficult this must be for my brothers who have their bedrooms downstairs, I felt so overwhelmed! We had to stop about 3:30 in the morning because my dad had to turn off the circuit breakers so no one would get electrocuted from the rising water. No circuit breakers meant no lights to see what we were doing, so we just had to sit back and let the water rise...There was a large storage container full of pictures in the storage room that we didn't have time to dig out. We ended up drying them in the sun all over the driveway - many were at least partially salvaged.

The water (a combination of river water and backed up sewage...) finally topped off at 22" and it sat in our basement for about 45 hours, then receded rather quickly. Demolition in the basement soon began - we ripped out all the smelly carpet, cleared all the rooms of stuff (some was saved, some was not), and started ripping out all the wet walls. With all that happened in those few days and the rebuilding that will continue for a few months, we still have so much to be thankful for. None of us were injured in this ordeal (the most important thing!) and a lot of important things were saved. I just keep thinking - what if the water didn't start coming until after my brothers went to bed and they woke up in two feet of water during the night when it was too late to save anything... Thank God that He provided time for us! As that Casting Crowns song goes "I will praise You in this storm..."

temporary sleeping arrangements upstairs...

"Dad the Builder" - Reconstruction begins!!!

The blue-painted cement floor
(with rugs, much less expensive than carpet)

Framing the walls - as of now, the boys'
rooms are just about framed up!