Rob and Emily Raleigh

Monday morning at about 9:30am I got an email from my mom saying that she was not going to Illinois to pick up my dad because there was 3" of standing water in the basement. I called her right away and she said that due to excessive rains in Duluth, water and mud had blanketed the entire basement. She had been bailing water out of the window wells since 7am that morning. Uncle Todd said he'd bring Dad back, but in the meantime it was Mom vs. Nature in what seemed to be a losing battle. After a few emails to my co-workers, I left work at about 10:30 to head to Duluth to help Mom out.

By the time I got there, the water had gone down. Mom thinks the City might have unclogged something after she talked to me because the water in the window wells had gone down considerably when before she had been bailing just to keep it from filling more. But still, the basement was a mess. In Tim's old room downstairs, the window well had filled so full of water and mud that it pushed the window opened and washed down the wall. Something must have malfunctioned to have left that much destruction.

Mom started the clean up by laying things out to dry on the kitchen and dining room tables. We then started scooping up the mud and ran the shop vac. After that we tried mopping up as best we could. My lead-foot uncle Todd made it to Duluth in record time and he and Dad spent the rest of the evening ripping up the carpet in the family room and getting the water out of the workshop.

What's even worse about having water and mud in your basement is having water and Duluth mud in your basement. It's not just dirt and mud. It's clay. The house sits on a bed of granite and a layer of clay with tiny little streams running under ground to the Lake. We couldn't dump any of the water we soaked up into the sink. For every gallon of water there was an inch of the silt on the bottom of the bucket so we'd have to bring each bucket up to the back yard and scoop out the clay.

By early afternoon Tuesday, most of the clay was mopped up and we were busy moving shelves and furniture around so we could get every last inch of the floor. I left in time to make it home before rush hour got too bad, and when I checked in with my folks last night they were ripping up the 40+ year old linoleum and they're looking now at water proof sealant paints for the floors.

It's really frustrating to see the house that way, when we did everything we could to ensure something on this scale would never happen. But with the 6 weeks of rain and fully saturated ground, the systems were all overloaded and I think the water had no where else to go.