Four Dogs and a Flood

(Not) Writing Excuse #87

It’s rarely good to hear a knock at your front door at 4:00 am. It’s even worse when you are housesitting a friend’s townhouse and four dogs while they are away on vacation.

There was really no need for a second louder knock; we were all instantly awake. The dogs lost their furry little minds immediately. High-pitched ‘yark, yarks’ from the two American Eskimos, deep-chested ‘woofs’ from the German Shepherd/Huskyx and a ‘roooodly’ yodel from the Huskyx puppy.

Zipping a hoodie over my PJs, I opened the bedroom door. The dogs roared down the stairs and hopped, danced and barked at the door. I expertly corralled them behind a baby gate to stop them from running out as I answered the door.

I shouted, “Knock it off” as I stepped onto the front step and closed the door. The hairy heathens’ muffled pandemonium continued inside unabated.

Street lights shone on the kind of middle-of-the-night street party you never want to be a part of. Neighbours were gathering in the street, chatting. There was a definite unfun vibe. The neighbour who’d knocked stood, apologetically, on the front stoop.

“Sorry to disturb you, Linda, but you might want to check the basement.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, we’re all flooded.”

“Great.”

“Yeah. We’ve got about 6 inches of water in ours.”

The neighbour on the opposite side added, “Yeah, we got a foot.” My eyes widened. “Do you want me to call Sharon?”

“No!” I said a little too sharply.

Sharon, the homeowner, was trying to enjoy a vacation in the Bahamas a year after she’d started chemotherapy.

“No, thank you,” I said, checking my voice this time. “Let her sleep. There’s not much she can do from there anyway.”

I went back into the townhouse and closed the door. The dogs started up again, yarking, barking, and yodelling in unison. Yay! You came back! It must be breakfast time! Walkies!?! It was barely 4:15 am.

I sighed and walked through the living room to open the sliding door and let the dogs relieve themselves in the backyard. I flipped on the espresso machine. I’m gonna need a double.

You see, we’d had freezing rain, snow, followed by torrential rain the previous few days. I’d heard it bucketing down about an hour or two before the knock at the door. That can’t be good, I’d thought as I rolled over. It certainly wasn’t.

Random snowfall before torrential rain and happy dogs.

I descended the basement stairs, crossing my fingers, hoping somehow we’d been spared.

Nope.

At that point, there was ‘only’ an inch or two of water, but that still constitutes a flood. I texted Sharon at about 6:00 a.m. to let her know. There were now 4 or 5 inches of water in the basement.

Then began a series of phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and texts. A restoration company was called, and a local contractor friend came by to check things out. He brought a small pump to start draining the basement. This same contractor had just refinished Sharon’s basement from the flood last July. His pump wasn’t keeping up, and the water rose close to a foot over the next hour.

The water rose above the bottom step. The little pump tried to keep up.

Sharon was, understandably, in crisis mode in the Bahamas. She’d been through this only 8 months before.

When the first flood happened last July, she was in the midst of chemotherapy—literally, at a chemo appointment—when she heard basements were submerged in the neighbourhood. She asked me to go check her townhouse. It was, unfortunately, flooded. That time had been worse because there were more valuable items in the basement. This time, a few items were saved before they got soaked, were already on shelves off the floor or were no longer in the basement.

The dogs, meanwhile, thought all this excitement was absolutely fantastic. Between texts and phone calls to the Bahamas, I managed to feed and walk them. As the sun rose, the neighbourhood began filling with emergency vehicles and contractors’ vans dealing with the crisis.

The restoration contractor arrived just after 9:00 a.m. They assessed that the water that everyone was pumping out of their basements was actually coming back in again, so they brought in a truck to draw the water out and haul it away. Soon, massive dryers were humming in the basement.

Sharon contemplated returning early from her vacation, but with only a couple of days left and the price to change her flight exorbitant, she stayed put. There was nothing she could really do. Frankly, there was nothing for me to do either, except manage the cacophony of barking whenever another person knocked at the door. I finally just barricaded us all in the living room so the restoration folks could come and go without navigating the dogs’ enthusiastic greetings each time.

Hope, Ember, Kilani and Maika’i, ready to alert me to the slightest sound.

I felt terrible for Sharon and all her neighbours. As I mentioned, this was the second flood in about 8 months. The first time, it was due to extraordinary rainfall. This time, it was human error… and rainfall.

A project to replace a pedestrian walkway over the rail tracks nearby had gone terribly wrong. A sixteen-inch by twenty-foot slug of concrete had been poured into the sewer line rather than where the new pilings for the bridge should be. The neighbours on the street behind us had already had sewage fill their basements a few days before.

Fixing the blockage did not happen quickly. After days of rain and snow, the wider neighbourhood got hit too. Fortunately, our flooding was rainwater, not sewage. Small mercies?

A flood is a flood.

Two days later, the recovery process well underway, Sharon arrived home. While she was not happy to have to face the mess all over again, she was relieved to be able to see it for herself. Her washer, dryer, furnace, and treadmill were all lost. It was the same or worse for the entire neighbourhood as everyone submitted insurance claims, underwent inspections, and got in line to purchase new washers, dryers, furnaces, etc.

A lawsuit now brews against the contractor who accidentally poured concrete in the sewer while installing the new bridge. Mother Nature wasn’t entirely to blame this time.

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Before this catastrophe, I thought I might use the week while house/dogsitting to finish some work. I was going to use this time productively!

The idea that I would get into a groove and find all kinds of ‘extra time’ to write and knit was insanity.

Four by four-legged (sixteen legs!) of activity kept me unfocused. The flood was the final straw for my flimsy attention. I gave in to social media, snuggling with dogs and ‘carb-loading’.

It took me almost a week to get back into my routine, from running to writing. I’m feeling better now, and I’ve lost the five-plus pounds I gained. I plan to return to my (more) consistent posts.

So that was my excuse…!

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How are you staying on track?