Crazy Storm

Unless Blogger decides to cooperate, this post will be pretty unorganized. Oh well. I was up until 4 am so I'm fried any way.

Last night we had a wild storm in Smithfield, Utah. It began with thunder and lightening unlike anything I've seen, especially here in Utah. The lightening flashed continuously across the sky. The thunder rumbled and rolled in the distance. Then the hail came down. And kept coming. And coming some more. Soon the backyard filled with water. It started swirling around the patio and began streaming into our stair well. I ran upstairs to get my father-in-law and by the time I got back downstairs the stair well was full of muddy water and it began seeping into the house. In a vain attempt I sacrificed all of my bath towels to try to contain the water while Bill ran outside with a shovel and tried to divert the water away. My mother-in-law was working with clients upstairs and they all came down to help, bringing the wet-vac. Unfortunately, the wet-vac couldn't keep up with the volume of water coming in. At that point I ran outside with a bucket and started bailing water like crazy.

You can see from the picture the water line at our door--it was nearly 2 feet deep! We have a drain, but the water came so fast and continuous that the drain couldn't keep up. We made some headway with the buckets and got the water out of the stairwell. Half of our family room carpet was soaked and the water continued into the kitchen area nearly to the fridge. (On a side note, I got the floor under the stove clean! Yay!)

Brian's brothers came and helped us pull up the carpet and tear out the pad. The water seeped further into the carpet and padding, migrating to the other half of the family room and into my bedroom. Fortunately we were able to move all of the furniture up against the wall before anything was damaged.

Ryan came with his huge cleaning fans and has us set up pretty nice to get the carpet dry. I later learned that a canal had overflowed and/or broken, causing much of the flooding in the area. Some homes had their basements full of water. This morning I was told that approximately 22 homes had reported flooding. The thought that kept returning to me, as I was standing ankle-deep in freezing water, was that I had planned on something like this happening in Louisiana...but never in Utah! Ironic.

At 1 am I was digging the potted flowers out from under the inches of hail and started thinking about what could be learned from this experience: 1) Wordly things can be taken away in an instant. Don't set your heart on them. 2) If I had to leave my home at a moment's notice, am I prepared? No. My 72-hour kit was disassembled when we moved from Louisiana and I haven't re-packed it. 3) I learned the wisdom in the council to store high protein, high carb foods in your 72-hour kit for times of stress. Because I worked so hard and strenuously, my body quickly ran out of fuel and I became dizzy and weak. My mom handed me a Peanut Roll and my sister-in-law vegged on ice cream with me, and I was temporarly restored. 4) Family and neighbors are amazing. I should have utilized my ward members better rather than trying to take care of it myself. If I knew who my home teachers were, I would have called them. It's wierd to say, but I enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed working together with friends and family in a common cause and seeing everyone come together. I enjoyed the rush of working really hard and becoming totally exhausted. I was able to laugh and joke and have a good time. My sister-in-law kept asking me if I was stressed out. But I wasn't. I'm sure that was helped by the fact that none of my material possessions were damaged and our safety was not in question. Somehow I was able to find joy in the moment and was blessed.