Fighting the flood

 First posted 16 July 2009

There was a cloudburst over Benton this afternoon.

The street out the front was an inch deep in some places with a stream simply running over the top of the drain by my front gate as it was too full to let any more water in.  I looked out of the back door and discovered the doormat beginning to float as the back yard filled with water.   

I put on my little red wellies and went out to investigate.

The problem was a blocked rainwater drain which we share with next door.  The rain from both our roofs descends through a shared down-comer.  Most is diverted into my rainwater-butt, there is a slightly smaller butt to take the overflow and once the butts are full the rest goes down the drain.  Because of the bay window and the fence there is little or no easy access to the drain.  There is about a six-inch gap between the big butt and the windowsill.

I tried leaning over and tried clearing the grill with an opened out coat hanger.   

The grill came away nicely.  

 Little bubbles of air came up from the drain.   

The water level remained much the same.   

Water continued to overflow from the butts.

Using buckets I emptied the contents of the smaller butt down the kitchen sink and moved it.    

I then emptied as much as possible from the big butt;  filling one bucket from the tap and bailing it out from the top with another.  After about half an hour of trudging back and forth to the kitchen sink at least the doormat wasn’t floating any longer.

The rain continued to be torrential.   

My hair got wet.  

So did all my clothes.   

So wet in fact that the water trickled down my legs into my wellies;   

to the point where they squelched as I walked and it spilled out over the tops.

All the while Fester was sat watching the Tour de France.

After I’d dropped a few very heavy hints (via Number Two Son) he ventured to the kitchen door and emptied a few buckets I handed him down the sink.   So he at least stayed dry.  

We got the big butt down to about half empty so there was no overflow from that.   

But as soon as we stopped it started filling again.

The rain continued to be torrential and even though there was no overflow the flood level remained the same, lapping at the doormat.   

There was nothing to do but to tackle the drain.

The only way to get to it was to lie down in about 5 inches of water in the aforementioned six-inch gap and work my hand down the drain.  But by this time I was so damn wet it made no difference.

Out came:  two 2 inch diameter ornamental ceramic plant pots;  a triangular piece of concrete half an inch thick with 3 inch sides;  various bits of stone and slate about the size of 50p pieces;  other bits of grit.  Once I got the bit of concrete out there was a sudden gurgling and the waters swirled down the hole.  It went so fast that had I not been wedged in the six-inch gap I might have been washed away.  I got up, replaced the grill and squelched my way back into the house.

Fester had the sense to run me a bath.  I stripped off in the kitchen, wrung out my clothes and emptied my wellies down the sink, went upstairs and sank into it relatively gratefully.