Noah MacGyver

The basement flooded early this morning and somehow, thank God, the breaker tripped & shut off the power down there. It's the deepest I've seen it with still, dark, dirty standing water over the last step of the stairs. The hot water heater and the furnace are partially underwater, and with no power the sump pump isn't pumping water out to the flooded yard. Which is probably good, all things considered.

One of the causes of this round of flooding was a faulty downspout that poured a cascade of water right down on the ground beside the basement wall. I went out in the storm to take a look with the old anxious homeowner's eye and saw the problem, then spent half an hour in the downpour rigging up & monitoring a drainage system worthy of MacGyver. The junk in the garage yielded an old spice rack and a kids' inflatable swimming pool - the spice rack is now under the L bend of the downspout to send water shooting out away from the house into the deflated pool, which extends from the spout out to lower ground in the north yard. After a few minutes of that the north yard was under about 4 inches of water from the old garden area to the neighbor's yard.

That was round one, now over Indianapolis. Here comes round two, now over Peoria and heading east. Oh, and we're under a tornado watch and a severe thunderstorm warning: