It goes back to the first house we owned in the Roeland Park area. Every time a gully-gusher came through, I would get water in the (partially finished) basement. No matter what I did to try to stem the tide, water somehow found its way in during hard rains. It got to the point where whenever it rained more than a little bit, I was walking around the house with an umbrella and heading down to the basement to make sure it was still dry. It could start raining at 3 o'clock in the morning and I would get up to check things out.
The trouble is that when we moved, the obsession didn't stay at our old address. I still have dreams, on particularly stormy nights, about getting up to clear clogged gutters in the middle of a storm, or Shop-vac out a river of water flowing through the basement.
Last night was no exception. The rain was falling hard when I fell asleep between thunder claps that sounded like they were right on top of our house. I had a dream that a water pipe in our clothes closet was leaking with a "drip, drip, drip" sound. In my dream, I saw the leak getting worse. The more I tried to tighten the joints, the worse the leak became. Our clothes were getting wet and moldy and still the water kept coming.
When I woke up, I could still hear the "drip, drip, drip." Obviously, I knew it couldn't be from a water pipe in our clothes closet. They don't put water pipes in there. But I could hear the dripping and it wasn't letting up. As the fog of sleep cleared, I realized that the ceiling fan in our bedroom was out of balance it it was making regular clicking sound that my stupid subconscious had incorporated as a leaky pipe into another water nightmare.
Driving to work, I saw that my nightmare was the least of the damage related to the storms.
The little park at 97th and Roe, next to a storm water creek, was caught in a flash flood. The playground equipment was still there, but the picnic table was gone downstream. And the timber frame containing the wood chips has been washed out of position.
About a block and a half south, I what water damage can really do to a basement that's too close to a storm water creek. About half of the wall for a lower level room had been washed away and there appeared to be pretty severe damage to the garage doors (and presumably the garage itself).
Lots of people in the neighborhood were pumping water out of basements and garages. One guy had moved everything out of his garage and onto his driveway to dry.I hope it doesn't rain on him again.
tagged: rain, weather, Johnson County, spring, home, dream, water
I hope they had flood insurance. Saw a VW dealership go underwater on State Line, that area gets flooded every time.
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