Water Woes

It's never a good thing when your son goes downstairs to the basement and you hear, "Hey, Mom!  You better come and take a look at this."

On Friday afternoon I was in the kitchen, preparing to plug in my vacuum cleaner and when I heard Joel say this, my heart sank.  Oh, no.  Please don't tell me that all four of the sump pumps failed at once.  I did pay the electricity bill, didn't I?  I must have, the lights were all on upstairs.

Yes, we really do have four sump pumps in our basement, another one of Carl's safeguards in case one fails, the next one will take over and then the next one....um, yeah, we have had a flooded basement twice which was twice too many times.  Nothing like stepping off the last basement step into six inches of ice cold water to get your attention. 

When we built the house 34 years ago we hit the same aquifer that the Quarry is in.  Both the quarry and our basement water levels vary with the water table;  with a constantly moving stream of water which the tile usually has no trouble removing with the sump pumps, but the sump pump has to run all year round.  In the summer it works out very nicely, we just hook up sprinklers to the supply of water and can water the flowers to my heart's content.  Might as well use the water instead of pumping it out to the ditch. Water is always on my mind around here, especially this time of year and with all of the rain we've had in recent weeks.  The soil is completely saturated right now.

But back to Joel in the basement...the dilemma wasn't as bad as I'd thought at first, the sump pump was working fine, but the basement had sprung a leak in a crack in a weird place we hadn't seen before.  There was a trickle of water going down the wall and across the floor.  Hmmmmmm.  Now what?

Of course, by now it's after 6PM and though it's not dark out yet, the rain was just pouring down outside and the temperature was hovering around 40 degrees.  Carl was out in his SOS building, trying to make some sense of the absolute junk disaster he has in there and I hated to call him out of there to take a look at our latest crisis, but felt I had no choice.  He came out of his building to see what the Wife had a bee in her bonnet about now.

We both went down in the basement and stared at the wall and little stream pooling at our feet.  It didn't seem to be growing in diameter, but it sure made us uneasy.  I grabbed a flashlight and we both went out in the rain to the back of the house to see if we could figure out why there was water coming through the wall. 

"Go get me a shovel," Carl said as he headed back to the house to get another flashlight.  I trudged out to the barn through the mushy snowbanks to get a shovel and met him back at the house wall.  He started to dig as I held both flashlights.  As he went down to about 4' the soil he was bringing up was surprisingly dry, which made no sense.  You'd think the ground would be soupy-wet, but it was just evenly damp.

Then we realized we had to dig down at least another 3' and the shovel wasn't going to work anymore so I was sent off on a quest to find the post hole digger.  My quest ended in disappointment, so soon Carl was also joining me on the search and after rooting around in the barn (where it ALWAYS is otherwise) and the garage (where it is sometimes when it isn't where it should be) and in his SOS building (where it COULD be but we definitely hope not because if it is in there, it's gone for good) we even searched in Carl's car (which is his Rolling SOS building) we came up empty.  No post hole digger.  And the rain started to come down harder.  The hole-digging would have to wait until tomorrow when we could locate the post hole digger (or buy a new one....)

By now it was almost fully dark out.  We've been debating pumping the Quarry pond down for a few weeks now.  We hate to do it because the pond is only as full as the water table, there's no liner in there, what we have for water in the pond is what Mother Nature provides, be it way too much or far too little.  This Spring, we're in the Unbelievably Way Too Much category.  Carl thinks the frost hasn't gone out of the ground yet and this could be why the pond levels haven't evened off yet, but we made the decision to throw a pump in there and bring the levels down some.  It's a possibility the water pressure in the pond is wreaking havoc with our drain tile around the house. 

Water levels in the pond are about five feet too high

So off to dig the big pump out of the barn and hook up the fire hoses.  (Yes, we have fire hoses, doesn't everyone? Carl picked them up out of a dumpster one day because you never know when you'll need a fire hose.)  We're both dripping wet by now with water running down our necks as we laid out the hoses and prepared to hook up the power. Luckily we didn't blow any circuit breakers with the wet conditions.

Old fire hose laid out to run water to the ditch.

We let the pump run for ten hours and came out to find the water had gone down quite a bit.  (Between the greenhouse heat beds and running the big pump, we're making the Power Company very happy this month.)

Finally the water is down to a more manageable level.  I know we'll wish we had that water back in July and August, though.

Comparing this level on Thursday:

To this level on Saturday:

I know it looks awful right now, but this is the level we had originally hoped the pond would remain at.  It might look better almost completely full, but I have a lot of plants planted on the shore and it's not good for them to be underwater.

So, instead of coloring Easter Eggs and hiding baskets, I'll be heading to the hardware store to buy a new post hole digger with Carl.

We're going to be digging this weekend.   And not in a good, 1960's way.  Not groovy, Man.