Monday, October 29, 2012

Flood zone...!

We experienced a weekend of unpredictable weather, bright sunshine interspersed with thunderstorms, lightning and dramatic cloud formations. While away from home visiting Jerome on Saturday afternoon, I received some frantic messages and phone calls and messages just after another thunderstorm with heavy rainfall, to return home immediately as flood waters had entered our home and filled every room. Apparently this happened in the space of one minute and there had been no time to react or prevent it from happening.


The photo shows the rainwater flowing down the garden and the huge pool of water, just before it entered the house, soaking and damaging everything in its path. While we have had water flowing toward the house in this manner previously, usually it has just flowed across the patio and past the back door, draining harmlessly into the garden. However this time, the sheer volume of the water meant the water level was high enough to go over the raised step and straight into the house. I returned home with Jerome, who also was not expecting such a lot of mopping exercise. With all hands, and buckets, brooms and mops on deck, we managed to get the water mopped up but the house was left in a miserable state of sogginess...!

The weekend was not marred by this event and after seeing to the cats, I left again to enjoy the rest of my weekend. This week however is going to be a mission of getting the house dried out and sorted out again.

I'm thinking we need to have a couple of sandbags ready in case this happens again...!

Momcat xx

6 comments:

  1. Couple hundred is more like it. Sounds like a lot of water.

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  2. You may be right Walking Man. We just need to keep it out the house until it can flow past the house. With global warming and excessive rain we're going to have to start building our houses on stilts soon like they do in the rainforests.

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  3. Sorry you had to endure that, but think of all the muscles that got toned with all the moping and sweeping and cleaning. WIN!!!!

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  4. That's Gauteng weather for you!

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  5. Cat - Gauteng weather aside because I like the weather up here mostly having come from rain-soaked KZN. I think the problems lies with a lack of storm water drainage and we are the only house on the plot which experiences this problem.

    Louisa - Thanks but Im not holding my breath. Not very good 'drying out' weather at the moment...

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