Floodwatch

So… heavy rain sucks.

This morning there was a massive rainstorm here in NY and the basement of our building flooded. Luckily for us, our apartment was spared any real damage, just a little seepage under our basement door, but three other apartments with direct access to the basement were not so fortunate. Our neighbors have about 3″ of water covering the floor of their apartment now, completely destroying many of their carpets, books, low furniture and any other stuff that was on the floor. It’s doubly bad for them since they’re in the process of doing work on their upstairs area and so are living in their basement. That means a lot of their stuff was in cardboard boxes on the floor waiting to be unpacked once the work upstairs was done.

Talk about a crappy day.

Plus, all of the building storage rooms, where many apartments keep extra stuff in boxes, were also filled with water. Again, luckily for us we only had plastic tubs in the storage areas, but many of our neighbors had stuff in cardboard boxes which means their stuff is most likely destroyed. The really strange thing about this whole mess was that we had a condo meeting last night to discuss some ongoing problems the building has been having with water leaks. Even weirder was that some owners expressed the opinion that as long as the leaks didn’t affect them they didn’t feel they needed to pay money to have it fixed.

Talk about Karma.

So now, as I sit in my dry basement I am thanking my contractor for insisting on using water-resistant and waterproof materials when he remodeled my basement. Even though those things cost me a little more money at the time, they are definitely worth the it now! Even more so since next weekend we’re supposed to be hosting a baby shower here at the apartment, and if we had flooded I’m not sure what we would have done with the 60 people coming over. Hmmm… maybe we would have been forced to hold the shower at Medieval Times, like I wanted to in the first place. Ah, just thinking about the serving wenches, leg-o-meat and jousting knights is making me smile.

Damn, maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to thank my contractor after all, huh?