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What a weekend!!

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Posted by: whenfoxforks-ruled---------------------

I live in northwest Indiana. I grew up in Calumet City Illinois. This is all on the south end of Lake Michigan. A million years ago, or so, it used to be the old shores of the lake. Various landmarks still stand on route 6 and route 30, both supposedly go coast to coast. This area has been and always will be a flood zone, sometimes the lake seemingly wants its property back! There is no way in hell you can figure mother nature, none. They engineer the roads higher, dig out and reroute water ways, and dump untold amounts of money in the deep tunnel project, dumping into the worlds largest lime quarry in Thronton Illinois, I-80,294 goes over the middle of it. Not to mention, all the cute little sub divisions that pop up out of the corn and soybean fields, the engineers dig storm water relief ponds in every one of them, and put play ground equpment in them, dual purpose areas. Well it was not enough, again! Record rain fall over the weekend sure put a dampner on my daughters 18th and my 49th birthday bash. We had a 1st annual pit bike race scheduled in my yard. The deluge killed our 2 entries in practice, no quads to send out first. During the week I generally take care of plumbing responsibilities. Rehabbing and bringing houses in Hammond Indiana up to modern plumbing codes. All their houses with basements and any plumbing openings are illegal by today's codes. Most all the houses are 60 years and older, some near 100! They were originally piped with galvanized pipe for water and drainage. It was estimated at a 20 to 25 year life, then it can fail. When it rains heavily they have to put a standpipe in the floor drain to prevent their basements from flooding. They do not want to hear their lovely basement is illegal. I can put backwater prevention in their floor drains, but the threads are rusted out of the floor drains. The sewage bursting out of the toilet, it can be stopped by a whole house check valve installed in the main sewer before any openings. These are the cheap band aid fixes. They need to be converted to overhead plumbing, and all their basement openings get rerouted to an ejector pit and pumped into the sewer. That is expensive! Now comes this weekends record rainfall, and record flooding. Plumbing friends went out on emergency calls, at 400 dollars and more an hour trying to help delusional home owners houses from flooding. Till they ran out of pumps, or it started coming into window openings. You can not fight mother nature. You can not out smart her either. But, the engineers will try


Posted by: Cabot---------------------

We got the northern tip of that storm up in Northern Wisconsin. At about noon it started to rain, by 2 it was raining pretty hard. Almost the whole second set of motos was cancelled due to rain. I was lucky enough to race the second to last moto before they cancelled. A pack of tear offs later, and my red gear and red bike were not red anymore!

Quote:
Originally Posted by whenfoxforks-ruled
You can not fight mother nature. You can not out smart her either. But, the engineers will try


New Orleans.


Flooded basements = not fun. happened to us a couple years ago. Instead of calling a plumber, we went with the bucket procedure.


Posted by: Sawblade---------------------

North West Arkansas took a good hit from Ike with 3 - 6 inch of rain. Some trees down and power outages and local flooding. I'm on high ground and only had to worry about one tree close to the house. With this rain over the weekend, we will be upwards of over 12 inches above anual rain fall and its only mid Sept.


Posted by: whenfoxforks-ruled---------------------

We ended up with over 11 inches. Traffic chaos? I-80-94 shut down, 60 miles of I-65 down, and good old US 41? What was a 15 minute ride turned into 2 hours. The Little Calumet river, actually flows both ways. All the feeder creeks to it and Lake Michigan were all closing the local roads for the first couple days. And when it all met at the river, it set new flood heigth records. Nothing you can do to help a house surrounded by water. Pump it out and risk the water caving it in. Everything that got wet by the sewage, garbage. The non-porus stuff is salvageable. Bare walls need to be sand blasted and disinfected. Gary,In. was passing out free tetanus shots to the people in flooded areas. Gary did all right during the storm, but when all the pumps started doing their job in Munster, and the run off, the stupid river backed up and flooded Gary. 80-94, they wrapped up the renovation on that early last year. Completely removed the old road and whipped in a new one. The Kennedy avenue inter change got put in 4 feet lower than the river, oops! They replaced all the bridges when they redid the x-way, duhhh! So I think we got more rain than Texas, but no storm surge. They too will rebuild, right where it will get erased again. Me, I stayed high and dry, damn near the highest spot in the township. Missed the tornado by a stink'in mile that hit a few weeks ago. Seen a lot of good people helping others, and now the fools with tools and others shall be raping the victims of their money.


Posted by: tweek49---------------------

Yeah, our power went out for three days, then on day two I went to work (stockboy at a local supermarket) and when all the power goes out they have to throw out all the frozen food... so thats what I did for like two hours, yeah I got to eat ice cream before it was thrown away! Not too mention I got to drink a whole bunch of orange juice.



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