50-Year Floods

So I've posted the last few springs and summers about the vast quantities of rain we've been having. I think eight or nine inches in a month was about the most I remember (we average between 3 1/2 - 4 inches per month).

I don't know the exact total, but this March we've had between 15 and 17 inches of rain. We had two storms where it poured nonstop for about three days. It was the rainiest March ever, and close to the rainiest month ever. There was lots of flooding in the area, and several counties including ours have been declared federal disaster areas (one bright side is that we have until May 11th to file taxes!).

How did we fare? Better than our friends the Faulkners in Winchester, who ended up with knee-deep water in the garage, five feet in their basement, and not a bit of lawn left to see. We had put a French drain on the uphill side of our house, and that really helped because we had no water where we've had it before. But, we got water coming in on the downhill side. Bridges set up a second sump pump, but we still had about an inch of water in two rooms in the basement. We had to move some things around, and Bridges spent a fair amount of time cleaning up water.

The horrible thing about it was that because the two big storms were separated by over a week, everyone had pretty much just gotten cleaned up from the first when it started raining again.