The flood on our street

So here's some more photo's about the crazy flood we had on July 26th. This is how the story goes. It started to rain kind of hard around 3:30pm or so which it often does in this city. Our back door that leads into our garage always leaks into our garage just a little bit when it rains and so I went out back to shovel out the water that builds up by the door. It was raining so hard that I just couldn't keep up with it. I've always been able to clear out the water faster then it builds up, but not that day. It was coming in way to fast. So I tried to block off the areas where the water was running in. Finally the rain stopped, my back was killing me from frantically shoveling out the water and I decided to just let the water run into the garage. It wouldn't be that much water, only enough to leave a thin puddle across the pavement, and everything was high enough up to not worry about. That's when I went back in the house and looked out the front window at the street. That's when a saw the street completely flooded and the water starting to run down our drive and pool up in front of the garage.

It's hard to see in the picture it was out of focus, but the water is pooling up on the driveway here. At first I didn't think it would actually get into the garage.
And it just keep coming in and getting worse.
Until the garage was completely filled with about 8 inches of water.

And then the water came into the basement.

I tried to move everything on the floor up on top of the couch and such, but I didn't get to everything before they got wet.
After the water drained from the street we had some great neighbors help us get the water out of the carpet.
Here is the water line in the garage.
And all the stuff in the basement ended up in the kitchen and the front room.

So after a week of carpet fans blowing on the carpet 24 hours a day the carpet was completely dry! Yay, we saved the carpet. Because we were worried about this happening again we got some sand bags and had them piled up on our driveway. We sort of felt silly having them there, they are a little bit of an eye sore and what's the chance of this happening again? Well we were sure glad we had those sand bags on August 1st, only 6 days later when another storm hit and our street flooded again. Here are the photo's from the second flood.
This second time was much worse. Without those sand bags it would have been bad. We'd moved a bunch of stuff in the garage to store while we waited for the carpet to dry.
Here we are trying to keep the water from pooling up too much on the drive way. We just had to keep shoveling the water out. And it started raining again. The sand bags saved us, but they don't stop all the water from coming in. There was leaking that we had to keep up with. We also didn't have enough sand bags and so it was coming around the sides. At one point in time I thought we weren't going to keep up with the water pooling up and I went and moved all the stuff in the garage up.
But we had great neighbors that helped A LOT! As soon as the rain hit people started showing up. I didn't even call anyone they just came over to check on us. They went and picked up more sand bags and helped shovel out water. We are so grateful for them. After that storm sand bags in front of your house became a fashion statement on our street. All the neighbors got them.
After our house was safe from being flooded all the neighbors moved down the street to another guys house. These homeowners weren't home at the time of the flood. So this was the second time they got flooded.
After the drain finally cleared out all the water the news showed up.
Jeremy even got an interview by Fox13. Here's the link to that:

http://www.fox13now.com/videobeta/5b806c6e-e50b-4cf9-836c-8e3f23706dd9/News/Homes-park-flooded-in-West-Jordan-after-heavy-rainstorms

So we kept the sand bags in place for about 2 more weeks until the forecast said it was going to be sunny for a week straight. Then we moved them to the side of our house for a quick grab if they are needed again. I've had about 5 dreams about our house and street flooding. I've become obsessed with watching the radar for storms. But all in all we fared pretty well. The drums that got wet seem to be fine. Since it is wood we will just have to wait and see if they crack, though. The carpet was saved. The sheet rock could be replaced in a few places, but over all it dried up pretty well. We were pretty lucky.