Rain, Rain Go Away

This weekend has been quite a soaker here in the Milwaukee Wisconsin area. Friday while I was at work we heard the tornado sirens and the rain poured down.

A couple hours later it was done, but there'd been plenty of rain. Here's the news story about it, if you are not from here and want to know how bad it's been. Even an area bar had the roof collapse from what many are assuming is the rain.

Saturday the day started out nice - a bit hot and very humid but the sun was out. As the afternoon came along the sky started to get darker and darker. By 4 pm there were tornado warnings and the sky was as black as midnight. The rain poured out of the sky for about 3 hours. Craig drove from the store to my sister's house to pick me up there after I'd been helping her paint her upcoming baby's room - and he was detoured from his original route no less than 5 times. On the way home we had to take 3 detoured routes as we came upon standing water in the streets.

Today we've heard stories from neighbors of wet basements, sewer backups, one person leaving car windows open to find several inches of water inside after the storm.

Now there rain is once again pouring, with flood warnings, high winds, and more thunder and lightening in th sky.

Our basement is old - early 1920's - with no sump pump and old and deteriorated drain tiles. Making things worse our neighbor on one side decided that instead of having his gutters drain into the pipe that goes into the street he'd set it up to drain into the edge of his back yard - the edge that connects to our back yard. And that part of the yard happens to be where our bad drain tile is. So we've had a small puddle this weekend. To be honest, we thought it would be much worse down there. We are actually kind of pleased with the small amount of water we have considering the amount of rain we've gotten this weekend and how bad our basement usually is.

In Milwaukee the city and county leaders go the bright idea several years back to build what we call the "deep tunnel" where the sewer water goes and then is processed by the sewerage treatment plants near Lake Michigan before the water is put back into use. Well, they also decided it would be easiest to have our drain water and the regular sewerage water all drain into the same tunnel system - so whenever it rains a lot - like it has been - the system quickly gets overloaded and they have to pump untreated or partially treated water into the lake before the sewers back up into the streets and homes. This weekend has been quite the bad weekend for sewerage dumping into the lake!

Based on the extended forcast the rest of this week is looking pretty wet too.