Storeroom Treasures: The Sump Pump

The sump pump scares me to death.  Why?  It has nothing to do with the little spiders that hang out near it.  It has nothing to do with the hole it fills in the basement.  What scares me is when I don't hear from it especially on a wet, rainy day.  In fact, this little motor instills so much fear in me that I got a friend for it as a backup when things get hard.  Regardless of my fear of this "storeroom treasure," it taught me a lot about my family and how quickly we come together when things get tough.  

About a year-and-a-half ago, my fears came true when we
received about 7 inches of rain in a matter of hours.  I came home from work to have my family show me the "lake" that had appeared in our backyard.  As I looked out on the extraordinary amount of water in our backyard, my heart jumped as I realized I hadn't heard that soft hum from the basement.  I ran downstairs and did the hard right "U" turn into our storeroom where the little motor and his friend live only to see water rise out of the hole.  I hollered to my family to get towels as I ran back up the stairs to the garage to get our shop vac.  By the time I got back downstairs, water has spread across our entire basement.  It was less than 3 minutes.  

It was an incredible night of frantic salvaging of stuff that we deemed important but had been sitting on the basement floor.  All this salvaging while also trying to stop the flow of water into the basement.  I finally reached down into the sump pump hole to discover that both pumps were running but just couldn't keep up.  I finally mustered both of my daughters who were scared and confused.  I got them each buckets and I started bailing water out of the sump pump hole.  They sloshed through the water to the basement bathroom and dumped the water from their buckets into the toilet.  As one daughter went to dump her bucket, I would fill the other.  All the while, my wife was in the living area of our basement, running the shop vac and trying to save our stuff.  About an hour after the rain had stopped, each girl had taken a break to eat a very late and cold dinner.  I continued to bail the sump pump hole.  Finally, an hour after the rain stopped, I noticed that I was making progress and the water fell below the pit line.  Then another 20 minutes, the pumps caught up and could expel all the water that was still rushing into the hole.  

It was an exhausting, frustrating, frantic night.  I sent the girls to bed around 10:30 and my wife and I continued to clean up water and dirt until about 1:00am.  The next morning my oldest daughter and I moved everything out of the basement to dry out in the 90-plus-degree, humid garage while my wife and youngest daughter ran to the hardware store for supplies.  Over the next several days, we tore out all the trim and flooring and brought in professionals to finish the job.  It took about 3 months before our basement was back to normal.  

The sump pump scares me, but when it failed it was amazing to see my family come together.  We "survived" our own tragedy of seeing some really special items (Christmas decorations, record albums, collections, etc.) destroyed and our house, which always seems "safe and sound," flooded.  The four of us fought hard to keep the damage to a minimum without complaint and we worked together.  I never wanted our sump pump to fail or our house to be damaged, but without that, I wouldn't have the satisfaction of looking back and seeing us all in that moment.  

We still have the same two sump pumps in the basement, and we have taken several precautions like everything on the floor of the storeroom is in plastic tubs, and we keep the buckets and shop vac next to the sump pump.  We also added a water level alarm.  Probably the most important thing is as a family, we have each other.  We know that we can count on each other when things get tough.  There may be some shouting, maybe some tears and loss, but we are there to back each other up.  I know that in times that may be less frantic than water filling the basement and in times that could likely be even worse, we've got each other's backs.  When it comes to that, I am a pretty lucky guy.