The Flood

After the delivery of the two new family members this Friday just gone, we had all pretty much settled down. The two kittens were laying on the rug snoozing, and I was pottering around the internet on my laptop. It began raining at this point and suddenly it got very heavy.

I didn't think much of it - it IS Gothenburg after all - and I carried on doing my thing.

After a while, I needed to go down to the DorkDen (what we call the basement), so I wandered down there - and found that there was about 10mm of water on the ground! The water was trickling in from outside - and what's more, the water level against the door from the basement to the outside steps was 1.5 meters high!  I had panicked visions of the door giving way to the pressure and getting a tide of water rolling in, destroying the whole basement.

I grabbed a bunch of towels and plugged them up against the bottom of the door, which it seemed was where the water was coming from (the rest of the door was doing a damned good job of keeping the water out!). Then I phoned Slaygon, as he lives nearby and I was going to need help on this.

Slaygon came 20 minutes later and we began the job of clearing up the immediate problem - removing the water. I had switched the electrics off earlier, so we made sure there was nothing electrical near the water and I slowly tripped each circuit back on, so at least we had light and the fridge was working. By this point, the water had pretty much gone down the drain outside, so there was no pressure against the door either.

Most of the water was going towards the laundry room at the back of the basement and it was about 20mm high out there. So we grabbed what we could and just scooped the water into buckets.

At this point we saw the Räddningstjänsten (Rescue Service) vehicles pull up and we found out from one of the guys that it wasn't just our house - 30 houses in all were being flooded. We were lucky in that with some of them, the sewerage was also coming back.


So, the first night was clearing the immediate problem and moving everything away from the floor. I thanked Slaygon by making a spicy pasta dish (and he had helped me by bringing beers!).


On the Saturday, Linda came back, and we got to work on the main problem - throwing things away. Unfortunately we have a storage area in the basement, and a few things had been water-damaged. So we had to be ruthless and throw some stuff away.


We continued this work on the Sunday, and went to buy a wet-vacuum, a normal vacuum (better than the one we had) and another dehumidifier (which always comes in handy anyway).


Today (Monday) we hired a van and, along with the water-damaged stuff, threw away some accumulated junk we had lying around in our shed too.


There's still more work to be done - cleaning the floors, making sure the floor isn't permanently damaged (by dehumidifying for a few days) and re-packing everything we saved.


So, that was my weekend. Oh what fun!