Early Monday morning I went to bed at my usual time, about 4:30 am. The winds were howling and I’d just finished my latest Java assignment for class. A good friend of mine, Barnaby from Connecticut, had just text’ed me some sorry images of his house being flooded by the coming storm. The rain was hard but I didn’t think hard enough to warrant that sort of concern for myself here in Maine ... little did I know.

When I woke at 9:30am the next morning ... water, lots of it ... outside the window, pressing at the glass, pouring down the streets, wetting everything in sight, even ... I later discovered ... our basement. The power went out while I was sleeping, and the sump pump, unable to do its thing, gave way to about 18 inches of water before we could reverse the process. Clean and fresh water luckily ...

We were fortunate enough to find our neighbors had friends that ran a carpet cleaning business. They offered the service of pumping out our basement. Thank god too, every Home Depot and Lowe’s that I went to were still sold out of generators from the last storm. It took 5 pumps including our own sump pump about 5 hours to drain it all. And another 5 hours to get the resulting mess back in order. While we got power back that same day, our furnace had gotten wet so we were unable to turn it back on before getting it a proper inspection. By Tuesday evening we had heat again ... and hot showers ... many of them.

Many thanks to all that helped that day, Mike and Troy, and Peter especially. You guys are what friends and family are all about

Here are some images of the event.