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My cell phone rang around 7 p.m. Sunday, June 8. I was sitting
on the screen porch of my parents’ home sipping on a beer and digesting
the round of golf I had enjoyed that afternoon with my father and
nephew. My parents live about 50 miles west of the Twin Cities in a
small town called Brownton.
My plans to leave early the following morning with my father and one of
his business partners for a week-long fishing trip to norther Manitoba
changed drastically during the next couple of hours. My wife called to
inform me Fillmore and Houston counties had been pounded with eight to
10 inches of rain and that there was three inches of water in the
basement of our home in Canton. She reported the rain had let up, but
everything was extremely saturated.
I told her I would call her back in an hour and see how things were
going. My wife knew how much this fishing trip meant to me. I hadn’t
taken a full five days off for a vacation in more than a dozen years. I
was about to spend four days fishing with my 83-year-old father, two of
my three sisters, and their husbands.
By 8 p.m. the water in our unfinished basement had risen to six inches.
While I was talking to my wife on the phone, my pager went off in our
dining room, and I could hear that the Canton Fire Department was being
called out because foundation walls on several houses in town had
collapsed. I got off the phone with Karla and started calling friends
of mine to see if anyone had a sump pump and could help my wife and
daughter deal with the rising waters.
It’s kind of a helpless feeling when you are more than three
hours from home and your wife is telling you of a natural disaster that
she and your 14-year-old daughter are trying to battle. By 9 p.m. the
water had completely covered the first two basement steps. It was time
for me to say goodbye to the fishing trip, find a sump pump and head
for rain-drenched SE Minnesota.
My brother-in-law had a pump and I left Glencoe, 170 miles from Canton
at 10 p.m. It was a very long three-hour drive. At 11 p.m., thanks to
my cell phone, I learned the water level topped two feet and still
climbing. I wished for a tele-porting system, ala Star Trek, where
“Scottie” could just beam me to Canton.
As I arrived in Canton at 1 a.m. Monday morning, the Canton Fire
Department was just loading up their equipment from my yard. My
comrades in arms had just spent the past hour pumping the majority of
the water from my basement with a portable gas sump pump. The house
stunk like spent gas fumes, but at least the 14 inches of water was out
of my basement.
The eastern sky was starting to show signs of morning when we finally
had the house aired out, and our nerves calmed down enough to get some
sleep around 4 a.m. I spent the next two days dragging out all the
water-soaked boxes of photos, record albums, stereo equipment, toys,
clothes, furniture, and all the other items one collects while living
in the same home for the past 23 years. We were lucky, the flood waters
had not gotten into our furnace motor, and our water heater was still
working. But everything stored in the basement on shelving that wasn’t
at least 15 inches off the floor was ruined.
Once I hauled all the damaged goods from the basement, it was time to
clean. And clean we did. The Red Cross arrived in town, so we were able
to obtain all the proper flood cleaning supplies. The city brought in a
large dumpster for flood debris. I had four trailer loads to
contribute.
After spending four long days working on the basement, which including
cutting in a sump pump system in the concrete basement floor, our flood
repair project was completed. Our once jam-packed basement was nearly
empty…and very clean. It’s amazing how much junk a person accumulates
over the years.
While I had to give up a five-day fishing trip, I felt very lucky,
especially when I consider how devastating the floods were and still
are in Iowa and other locales throughout the Midwest. I’ve covered
various natural disasters during my nearly 30 years in the newspaper
business, and even had my office in Spring Valley flooded twice. But
this was the first time I had to deal with a flood that directly
impacted my home and family…and hopefully the last.
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