Flooded!

A few hours after I posted yesterday I lay down to take a nap, having not slept much the night before. Around 6 pm I awoke to hear my husband screaming my name. I looked out the bedroom window to the side yard and this is what I saw.

What the photo doesn't show very well is that the water is not standing, it is rushing, roaring through our side yard to the street. And here is the backyard:

This is also not standing water, it is rushing and roaring water. It's coming from the church parking lot in back of our backyard -- well, where it's really coming from is Bear Creek, which had jumped its banks and went roaring down Table Mesa Boulevard and from there down Broadway and from there into the church parking lot and from there into our backyard and from there into both of our side yards and from there into our street. Unfortunately on its way it also went into our basement (you can see the doors to our basement in the front of the photo), AND straight into our house. It's a really weird experience to watch water rushing into your house through two sets of doors (screen/storm doors and regular doors), all of which are closed and locked.

My camera battery chose this moment to die, so while our house is being flooded I'm running around trying to find an outlet to charge it. I was really impressed by my inability to make good decisions in the face of disaster. I couldn't think what to do, so I called my sister Barbara (who has an easy to remember phone number). She started telling me what to do: get important things off the ground and put them in high places. Oh. I hadn't thought of that. I got off the phone and went to put some of the twins' nicer toys on top of their toy cabinet. I also moved some books from low shelves to high shelves. Water is rushing into the house and I'm trying to decide whether my parents' high school yearbook is worth saving. What about two copies of my dissertation?

Meanwhile Rocket Boy was outside doing something really really useful: he tied our back gate (that leads to the church parking lot) shut, to reduce the flow, and then he opened up our two side gates to let the water flow out to the street, thus giving our house a break. He kept coming to the door to scream at me to do various things, such as find him a claw hammer so he could take one gate apart, and then find him another claw hammer because he'd dropped the first one and the water carried it away.

I only have one photo of the water rushing down our street, and it was taken at night so you can't see much.

Again, that's not standing water, it's moving. Off and on through the night, our street was a roaring river. It kept carrying things away with it, too. At one point we saw the twins' toy recycling truck heading east on Dartmouth. Rocket Boy ran after it and got it back.

Inside, I got the idea to try to block the flow with towels and blankets, so the twins and I emptied the linen closet. There was so much water already in the house that we also covered the floors with linens, to sop up the water and also to be able to walk without slipping. Here's what the back door looked like with all the cloths up against it (this is later, after we'd done a lot of cleanup, when my battery was charged again):

RB and I got a sponge and mop brigade going -- I sat on a stool at the edge of the kitchen and dipped a sponge into the water on the floor, squeezed it into a bucket, dipped it into the water again, back and forth, back and forth, empty the bucket, do it again.

Water also ran into our garage, so Rocket Boy set up pans to catch the water (we had to empty these every minute or two -- this photo was taken after the rain stopped but we were afraid it would start again).

We finally got things under control and the water stopped coming in, but after a bit it started coming in again. I realized that it would be bad for our floors to be covered with sopping wet towels, so I started doing loads of laundry. Each time a load came out of the dryer, we'd pick up the current batch of wet towels and blankets, throw them in the washer, and put the load from the dryer in their place.

During breaks, when the water stopped coming in, RB mopped the floor. The water was of course full of mud, so we had mud all over our floors, including underneath furniture. Here's some mud we found when we moved some cabinets:

In the midst of all this mess, of course we still had five-year-old twin boys to take care of. I attempted to make dinner and just ruined it -- poured some rancid old pasta sauce on the noodles, WAY overcooked the shrimp -- and finally I just made Baby B toast and gave Baby A a granola bar. Time seemed to pass very quickly. Every time I looked at my watch it was at least an hour later, if not two. Around 8 pm Baby B went in their room, crawled under his blanket, and went to sleep, where Baby A and I found him at 9 pm. I got both boys into pajamas and read them a couple of stories, before going back to help Rocket Boy with the mess.

One reason I had trouble figuring out what to do at the beginning of the flood was that I wasn't sure what kind of a disaster it was. It was hard for me to assess the severity of it. Should we grab the kids and our computers and run for our cars to evacuate? And should I do the dishes first? Or should we stay and fight? But how? (At one point while water was rushing in, I decided to empty the dishwasher. It was something to do.) I'm seriously impressed by my husband's ability to make good decisions in a crisis. He's very good at seeing through the fog. I'm not. Many times last night I was reminded of why I married him, and I told him so.

I finally went to bed around 12:30, and Rocket Boy came to bed maybe around 3 am? (I don't know.)

This morning when we got up, it wasn't raining, so I went out to look at the damage. Here's our side yard:

You can see where the river went through. And here's where the rocks went:

Here's the other side of the house, which also had a river running through it:

And the backyard:

And here's Broadway and the church parking lot to the left.

Can you see how the creek kind of jumped across the street (from the right) and headed down the parking lot to the left?

And here's our back gate (seen from the church parking lot). You can kind of see Rocket Boy's rope, where he tied it shut.

It's been raining again this morning, but as I type this the sky is brightening and I can see a bit of blue. I know there's more rain to come, but I really think we've seen the worst of it. Despite how terrifying it all was (and the fact that we still have two feet of water in our basement), our experience was NOTHING compared to what many people in Boulder had to deal with. And the mountain towns, and Lyons and Estes Park and Longmont and Loveland... and Colorado Springs, and so many places in this state. It makes me ill to think of the damage done and the cleanup that lies ahead.

But we are OK.