The River Watch Saturday night

(Our personal flood story, complete with pictures, starts at Albany Park floods-- Record-breaking rains. )

It was still raining Saturday night, and I walked the street with my raincoat on, soaked anyway.

Here's a short video I found on YouTube. It was taken about two blocks west of our house, on the other side of the flooded park:



Flood from Avers and Foster on YouTube .

We didn't have any water in our street on Saturday afternoon, but with floods all around us, I was worried.

I kept going back to the river. I had spotted a tree and that tree was my guidepost. The river rose past that tree. Would the river rise over the little hill that separated the bicycle path from the alley and the homes on our street?

I went out to the front of our house. I walked down to the river. I had a guidepost up there also.... Would the river rise above that guidepost and start to inundate our street as it had inundated the 5000 blocks of Monticello and Central Park?

Sometime in the evening the water did start to tumble into our street. It stayed in the street, just in front of the southernmost houses on our street, and it didn't go up the lawns to people's houses. Maybe that was a good sign!

I watched all evening, in my raincoat, until 9 or 10 o'clock. The river didn't seem to be getting any higher on the far southern side of our street. Perhaps we were going to be o.k.

In our home, down in our family room, we were still safe and sound.

And then we heard water.

Just a few drops, but it was definitely water. Where was it coming from?

It was in the laundry room. Behind the refrigerator. Paul pulled the refrigerator away from the wall, and we saw a trickle of water underneath it. Just a trickle.

Maybe there was something wrong with the refrigerator?

No such luck... we noticed drops emerging from heretofore-unnoticed cracks in the basement floor around the drain in the laundry room. First just one little rivulet from one tiny crack, then another. But the water was dripping from those little cracks right into the drain, so that wasn't much of a problem. Nothing else in the basement seemed wet.

I went back to watch t.v., Paul was out in the garage doing something. And then I noticed that I didn't hear that little flow of water anymore.

Maybe the water had stopped? Hopefully, I went over to the drain to look.

Then I saw why the flow of water had stopped making the little gurgling noise.

Next part of the story: Here comes the water!