You Find Out Who Your Friends Are

You find out who your friends are
Somebody's gonna drop everything
Run out and crank up their car
Hit the gas, get there fast
Never stop to think 'what's in it for me?' or 'it's way too far'
They just show on up with their big old heart
You find out who your friends are
(lyrics from a Tracy Lawrence song)

Well, we certainly found out who our friends are this past weekend.

Hurricane Ike made its way up into the midwest and on Sunday morning, we got some pretty HEAVY rain. I was in the basement showering and when I was done, I noticed that the shower water was not draining as fast as usual. Then, a minute or two later, I heard the toilet make some weird kind of "bloop" sound and no one had used it! Then I noticed water seeping UP through the drain in the middle of the floor. Not good. I yell for Hubby to come downstairs and I guess he could tell by my voice that something was wrong so he came running......

He decided to plunge the drain in the floor and raw sewage pretty much came flooding out of it. Yeah. So B1 and B2 scrambled around the room taking things out and as far away from the drain as possible. Hubby got the shop vac and began cleaning up that mess while I drove the girls to Sunday School (right down the road). I came back, and just a few minutes later, the alarm was going off near the sump pump, indicating that the water level in there was too high. So Hubby and I went into pretty much full "panic" mode. He started shop vac-ing, I started scrambling for something to pour the shop vac water into because we couldn't pour it back down the drain (which still wasn't draining). We both got on our phones and began calling people for help.

As it turned out, eight other friends and family came rushing over to our house. We carried buckets and buckets of water from the sump pump (ground water by now, no more sewage) up the stairs and out the door, dumping it down the driveway. Finally, we got a little smarter and did an assembly line type of thing so everyone wouldn't have to continue going up and down the stairs. Hubby manned the shop vac with one other person helping him, friend Mike ran to a nearby town to get some equipment he thought would help, and brother-in-law Randy brought some kind of machine that we eventually got set up outside which pumped the water from the sump pump up through a tube and out into the ditch. Whew.

We were all seriously dripping with sweat by the time the water slowed down. The problem is that our basement has been waterproofed. This means that any water that comes in through the walls is channeled through little tunnels in the floor and all towards the sump pump. The problem was that with all that rain, the sump pump couldn't handle all that water. This happened to us once before but we didn't catch it that time until all the damage was done. This time, we got lucky. We are now in the market for a second sump pump to hopefully alleviate this problem if it arises again!

Thank goodness for good friends!