The move and oh yeah...the Flood of 2004

[tomboudreau]

Greetings everyone. I just wanted to say that our move to Pittsburgh was successful, but not after a night of pure heck. I am only getting around now since we still do not have internet access at our place. The morning of the move, the heavens opened up around 1AM as a thunderstorm rapidly developed over head and stalled there until the first squall line of the day moved through around 6AM. In that 5 hour period we picked up nearly 6.5" of rainfall. The local roads looked like rivers. The lightning was so vivided that you could read a book from it. Around 4 AM, we began to hear gurgling noises come from the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and tube. Around 5AM, we began to smell sewer gas in the house as it continued to pour outside, and around 5:20AM, our tube quickly filled with 4 or 5 inches of sewer water. It was horrible. We called our landlord to tell them we were rapidly taking on water inside the apartment. As my wife was on the phone with them, water began to come into the apartment, in our office. I quickly disconnected and moved both of our computers out of there and put them onto the dinning room table. Our landloads told us, if we could, to start bringing boxes of our stuff over to their place and we could store them there until we picked up the U-Haul later in the day. I went outside in the pouring rain to get the car and bring it around to the side of the house. As I was doing this, my wife called the fire department to see about getting the basement pumped out since we figured there was water down there. They told her they were not going to do any pumping until the rain had stopped. I took the first box to the car and decided we were not going to get any boxes outside because in the mere 10 feet I had to go, the box got totally soaked. We got a phone call from our landlord shortly after I decided we were not going to get anything out to the car, and he told us that he couldn't get across town because there were some sections of road that were under 3 feet of water! Finally, around 7:30 the rain began to subside and slow down. The guy that runs the barber shop in the front of the building arrived around 8 in the morning for the day, and we told him what was going on. He helped me open the basement door (it weighs almost 60 pounds, so I wasn't going to do it by myself), and we say that the water was already 4 feet deep in a 5 foot basement. It only had 2 more stairs to go up before it was flowing out of th basement area.

By 9:30 or 10:00, the rain had stopped completely and the sun was shining brightly and the water began to subside. The creek in the area that runs through our part of the town was about a foot below flood stage by our apartment, but it was in flood on the southside of town. We have pictures of the flood that I will be posting on my website when we have our internet connection established. The rest of the day went pretty uneventful for the most part. Around 6:30ish, we had the remains of a squal line move through that didnt bring much rain, wind, or hail. But after the morning, we didnt need anymore excitement.

The rest of the move went without any excitement, which after Friday morning, was a good thing. We are slowly unpacking things now and getting things in place for the short amount of time we are going to be at our current location. We are going out this weekend to look at possible houses around the Pittsburgh area. If we find anything that we like, we are going to contact real estate agents and might go and see them soonish to get an idea.

Tom