Flooded.

[swestrup]

Woke up to a flooded basement this morning. Unlike last time, the "water" had mostly drained back away by the time we found out about it. That's not to say there isn't a huge mess. We still had piles of boxes that hadn't been dealt with since the last flood. The bottom ones got wet, so the stacks collapsed, getting many others wet and making a huge mess. In some way though, its not as bad as last time. We had many more things piled on shelves this time and many of the things directly touching the floor were fairly resistant to getting wet. So far a preliminary look in the wet boxes hasn't shown up any major losses, but we've only peeked in most most them.

taxlady is extremely unhappy, of course, as her office is in that basement and she had a large pile of papers on the floor that she was sorting through when this happened. The entire stack got soaked and she's having to carefully peel the pages apart, sponge them lightly, and hang them on makeshift drying lines.

None of this was supposed to be able to happen again since we went out and installed a backflow arrester in the drain that backed up last time. However, clearly that plan didn't work. I have no idea if the problem is:

1. Crappy backflow arrester doesn't work.
2. Backflow arrester was installed improperly by me (there were no installation instructions with it).
3. The water came from somewhere else this time (a neighbor's drain perhaps? Our basements drain into each other...)
   
4. Martian Conspiracy.