I have rarely felt so helpless and frustrated as I did last Saturday afternoon, as I sat on my basement stairs, a basement which had about four inches of (clean) standing water. My flood control system was apparently not working and neither were either of my two sump pumps. The streets were completely flooded. All I could do was just sit and wait for the water in the streets to go down before my basement would drain.

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It had rained steadily all day Friday, picking up the pace into a downpour by evening. By Saturday morning, I had never seen so much water in the streets (and in my basement). The real scary part was that it was still raining very heavily. Fortunately, the sewers were opened mid-afternoon on Saturday and I watched the water slowly leave my basement.

Fellow GT’er Louie was experiencing the same thing, about a mile south of me. We were lucky, though. Some of our neighbors got over three feet and it didn’t drain out until the next day. This happened 1,000 miles away from the Hurricane Ike target of Houston. We have all seen the devastation in that area.

I have talked to friends out there who are still without power. That really puts my minor basement damage in perspective. I had to get rid of carpet (which was overdue to be tossed anyway), but aside from that I had no major lasting damage. I did take the opportunity to toss out some other stuff which had gotten wet, including empty appliance boxes, trays of audio cassettes, an old bulky PC monitor and even some 8 track tapes (anyone remember those?). My basement is now much less cluttered. My heart goes out to those who suffered true loss during the hurricane or residual storms. My loss was insignificant in the big picture.

Even as I dumped another bucket of cleaner on my floor, I figured I was very fortunate. Sometimes I need to remind myself to look beyond my own existence.

-John Wroblewski, distribution specialist