flyfisher51's Blog

Irene Recap
Sep 3, 2011 | 9:41 PM PST
Tags: September4 , 2011

Irene has come and gone and all I really lost was a nights sleep and a few pounds moving everything out of harms way. The sump pump did its' job until 1:00 AM Sunday when the water level in the pit entered the French Drain. I added a second siphon pump and it reversed the process for a while. To be safe my wife and I started moving containers from the basement floor to upstairs. I moved everything off the bottom two shelves of the shelving units to higher ground and loaded the train platform. At 2:30 Irene started winning again so I moved the dryer to the front, higher, part of the basement. I didn't attempt to move the washer then since I think it weighs as much as my 1973 VW Beetle. At 3:30 the water breached the laundry room and with a huge ummph I got the washer on the hand truck and moved it to the front and was able to raise it 6 inches. I put the Dryer on a skid and hoped we wouldn't lose electricity. We didn't, we were fortunate. Between 4 and 5 we took showers before turning off the oil burner as a precaution. It rained until about noon on Sunday but the water never got higher than 6 inches in the laundry/fly tying room and 2 inches in the front. We had about 4 inches at the burner but the service man came and told us nothing important had been compromised with the oil burner. (I will take a marker and put a line at this high water mark for future reference.) I was back to doing laundry on Thursday night and we will finish putting everything back tomorrow. I sprayed the basement with chlorine bleach mixed ½ and ½ with water and a Lysol mildew preventer.

Hopefully this will be it until I upgrade my system.

On a different note.... Monday morning as I was having my coffee on the deck, preparing to start cleaning up, I saw a baby Catbird on the railing. It had short wings and no tail. I guess it was blown from the nest. It was noisy as it hopped and flew around the deck and bushes. It also hopped up an grabbed a small butterfly. It was there all day. I went to work the next day and I haven't seen it since. I am sure it is okay. It made itself at home and was very self reliant.

Hope everyone is doing well. Happy Gardening! John