Sun
16 Jul
Last weekend, the sky opened up over Berlin in two huge cloudbursts. Both times, up to 7.5 gallons of water fell per sq. yard in an hour.
As I looked out a window from the second floor after the first storm, I saw the ramp area behind the basement filled with a couple of feet of water. Rushing down to see what was happening in the cellar, I was overwhelmed by the smell. It was as if the entire sewer system had backed up in the half-inch of water covering the floor of the kitchen and laundry area. Matthias and Sieglinde were gone to Dresden for a meeting. Following a quick phone call, they hurried back to Berlin. Within two hours, a friend had arrived to help with his pump. A quick trip to “Obi” (German “Home Depot”) followed and a second pump was purchased. We began the clean-up operation, falling into bed late that night.
At 5:45am I woke with a start to the sound of pouring rain: a second cloudburst had begun. Matthias and I rousted our friend out of bed and we connected both pumps. We kept just ahead of the water, pumping it into the garden and the city drains. We probably moved between 5,000 and 7,000 gallons of water in an hour.
When I went into the basement after the first rain, I whimpered, “Why this, Lord?”.
At it turned out, though, this too was grace. It could have been so much worse. We discovered that the smell wasn’t from the sewer, but from a fat filter left over from the time that the kitchen was used for the entire “House Nazareth” orphanage community. The cleaning was hard but not impossible. And if the flooding had happened after the remodeling work for the ground floor had been done, it would have been much more problematic. As it is, the fat filter will have to be removed and the drain system cleaned. And we’re going to make sure that the sumpf pump is ready to go any time.
Sometimes what starts out looking like a curse is a mercy in disguise (even though it smells like a curse.) BTW: The smell is gone from the basement (-:
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