Eric's Hangout: Life Turned Upside Down (Basement Flood)

We had a fair bit of water in the basement once before after a heavy, heavy rain. But it didn't really have the same impact. That time around it still required bringing the huge dehumidifiers and driers, but the damage seemed largely confined to the furnace room, and in the end we didn't even have to change the carpet. Clearly this should have been a warning of sorts, but what I ended up doing is changing insurance (because TD completely stiffed us on the water damage coverage) and ultimately pulling all of my money out of TD after generally being dis-satisfied with them, mostly related to the insurance business but for other reasons as well. Maybe if they had covered some of the costs (which were mostly just labour), they would also have required us to put in a sump pump to keep our insurance premiums from rising. Now I have no idea if a sump pump would have made enough of a difference, but our neighbour has one and didn't have any significant flooding. I remember thinking at the time that I should have the basement windows treated as that seemed to be part of the problem, but the contractor at the time said the window well treatments were ok, but that I really needed to reroute the rainfall from the gutters, as part of it went straight down the side of the house and connected with some city-owned drain that might cause flooding at some other point, and we did that. But no one at the time said we really needed a sump pump. (I'm not even sure if they asked about it when I switched to the new insurance company.)

At any rate, last weekend, it was supposed to storm (and many people thought the Taste of the Danforth would be wiped out at least for one day), but it really didn't. Instead, the East End was hit very, very hard with intense showers for about 15-20 minutes. And it didn't even rain downtown, which just seems incredible. So if the rain had been spaced out a bit more or ideally just bypassed my neck of the woods entirely, then this entire mess could have been avoided. I'm pretty sure that the construction for the Ontario Line nearby, which often shakes the house all the way to the foundation isn't helping matters either.

I had briefly toyed with the idea of going to see Sheep in a Box at Carlton after work, but stayed a bit late instead and then came home. My wife had been trying to call me but somehow I didn't get the message. (This became a bit of a running theme of the evening.) She said that there had been a lot of flooding and that the basement smelled terrible, which indicated that the worst had happened and that the drains that backed up were combined water/sewer pipes or something.

I was able to catch someone at our new insurance company just before they signed off for the evening (and I also checked to make sure that we had a water damages rider and that we were up to date on the insurance!). Unfortunately, the email back from them didn't actually tell me who the contractor assigned to the case was, and this contractor apparently tried to call but the voice mail didn't actually go through. This was incredibly unfortunate as the contractor had been around the corner on Egan (which is even lower than our street and was hit just as hard by flooding).

There really wasn't all that much to be done in the evening. I looked around a bit and pretty much everything in the bedroom downstairs had been impacted. It was particularly annoying in that I had tried to clear up some space upstairs by taking a crate of LPs downstairs, only a few weeks prior to this, and they all were soaked beyond salvage. I didn't see it but there had been water 4-6 inches deep pretty much everywhere downstairs, but it had retreated by the evening, though it definitely didn't smell great. It seems likely that it came through the furnace room, as that seemed to have the highest watermarks and the floor was still quite damp, though the carpet everywhere was quite squishy (and disgusting when one stopped to think about it).

The next morning was spent trying to get the claims adjuster on the phone. I finally got through to her and then got the contractor's number. By the time I got through to him, he said he didn't have any crews available and that I should have contacted him yesterday evening when he was nearby. He said he could send a crew Wed. morning. I was pretty furious and asked the insurance company to reassign me to someone who could come by on Tues., but she said that seemed unlikely given the large number of flooding claims that they were dealing with, so I had to call back the contractor and eat humble pie and get an appointment for first thing Wed. morning.

I took most of the day to go through and see what could immediately be salvaged and what I wanted to try to salvage (or at least scan) even if it had clearly been soaked in the disgusting water. One small consolation is that the many CDs downstairs had all been ripped before I took them downstairs, with the exception of two box sets (including a Tafelmusik one) that really seem to have come through relatively unscathed. I do need to disinfect those box sets a few more times. So many of the CDs seemed to be above the water, though I did hang onto 5 or so that were signed, and I guess I'll just scan the covers and dispose of them. The LPs are pretty much a total write-off, though there were more (5 or so) which I hadn't recorded, and then Andrew Hill's Nefertiti, which I had recorded but there was a terrible electrical hum throughout, so it clearly has to be done again.

I spread a lot of stuff out on the deck to dry out, which I am sure is not really the approved technique...

I can't remember, but I don't think I was particularly careful about wearing gloves on that first day, but I got much better as the week went on.

In pretty much all cases books on the second shelf were ok. The books on the bottom shelf near the washer/dryer were all toast. Interestingly, the damage was fairly limited in the books on the bookcase in the bedroom. If it had only been water, there would have been no issue. I decided that I would replace a couple of the Gorey Amphigorey books, but the ones that are really rare (including a bunch of Krazy Kat daily strips and a signed copy of Rushdie's Step Across This Line), I would hang onto after drying them out. Maybe this is a bad decision I will regret later. I suspect in the long run, I will scan the Krazy Kat books and part with them, deferring the final decision for a while. But I have so much scanning of photos and a handful of ultra rare comics to do in the meantime.

I'll just post a couple more photos of the progress of emptying out the basement (and even ripping out much of the dry wall), and then I really need to head out.