The Destruction of Memorial Day 2011

Monday May 30 2011 will go down as a dark day in the memories of a few other families who live on our street. We had high expectations for memorial day.We thought that Riley's team was going to playing in the championship game on this day, turns out they came in third. Downer. Then I wake up to rain outside. Double downer, because now I can't run. Then I get a call from our neighbor Angie saying that her basement flooded and her husband was digging a trench in our yard by our fence to try and get the water to go out to the road. The first thing I did was tell Chad what was going on and then I went and checked in our basement. Luckily we didn't have any water in our basement other then a few little tiny puddles.Then we went outside to check on Kris. The image in my mind of how it was going to look outside was NOTHING compared to how it really was. Half of our backyard was under water, we felt like the water was slowly closing in around us and it was still coming down. Next we look over at our fence that is between us and Kris and Angie. Our garden was completely under water and there's Kris,feet buried in the mud, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, shoveling away at this muddy mess. He looks up at us with our looks of shock on our faces and says "Hey, just doing some memorial day gardening for ya!" We laughed and continued to survey the rest of the damage. We had a lot of water and mud. Kris and Angie had a lot of water and mud and a very large sink hole on the side of their house closest to us. I got some boots on and headed over to Angie's. Chad got dressed and headed out to join Kris. I walked into Angie's house, looked down into the basement and could not believe my eyes. Their basement was under a foot of water. Muddy water. The men and Angie all got to work.It was a long process starting at 7:30 and ending at 12:00. We finally got all the water drained out of our yard and out of the Maxfield's basement. It was a long day and poor Chad was so dirty and tired after it all. We have some plans in the works for how to hopefully fix this problem. Hopefully next spring our improvements will keep us dry.

Off our back deck

Our garden completely under water

A few little puddles in the basement

Trying to figure out where all the water was coming in from and how to get the water moving out to the road

This is Angie and Kris's house. Our house's damage was nothing compared to theirs

The bottom of their stairs. Kris had just finished framing their basement.

The front yard between our two houses

Water in the trench

This is after the water drained out of our backyard.

The mess of the aftermath