Crazy rain here the last week. Last Monday night we got about 150mm in around 3 hours. For the first time ever, we got water in our basement.
Along with thousands of other houses in St. Catharines, we had the sewers totally back up and water was coming up our floor drain in the laundry room.
We were awoken by our freezer beeping at 5:00 in the morning because it’s door jar sensor had gotten wet, so we were fortunate in. We were able to start mitigating the issues and as a result only had about an inch of water. It was still enough to mean that we’ll need to replace the flooring in four different rooms in the basement.
Saturday night, we noticed the toilet wasn’t draining, so I opened out the clean out again and water was totally backed up. This was just us though. Though MSL my theory is that the flat earlier in the week pushed a bunch of debris up into our sewer drain line. So I spent Sunday morning with a power snake cleaning that out.
Then yesterday afternoon into evening we got another massive dumping of rain, along with tornado warnings, and once again widespread sewer back loops. Loops. We again had about an inch, although this was more widespread in our basement then last week. Our neighbors had it worse than us again, with a few inches to a foot, and even a couple that had no issues last week had flooding last night.
A lot of people in town pissed at the city. I’m torn. The amount of rain we got the first time was just too much in too short of a time for any system to deal with, so it’s hard to fault the city. Yesterday however while it was a lot of rain, it was over like 10-12 hours so I’m not sure what happened.
Our house is 1960’s era and does not have a sump or a backflow valve. I just applied to the cities backflow valve program so hopefully they will get that processed quickly so we can get one installed soon at 90% rebated.
Now off to rip out more floors and drywall.
