Taking Back The Basement With Towels, Sump Pumps

It came up through her floors, oozed out her walls, seeped under her doors and windows.

"It was coming in almost every possible opening of the house," Anarosa Garcia said of her home on Eighth Street NE on Capitol Hill. "It was everywhere."

Fought with brooms, shovels, buckets, pumps, towels and bare hands, it was a relentless, often unstoppable and always unwelcome visitor that barged into thousands of houses across the region this week.

It was, as one shaken person recalled, "the big rain."

For eons, humans have sought to keep water out of their dwellings -- with thatch, wood, sod or stone. For many in the Washington area over the last few days, nothing seemed to work.

Thousands of private insurance claims have been filed, and scores of houses have been damaged extensively. Parts of Alexandria, Laurel, Hyattsville and the District were hit especially hard.

It's difficult to say exactly how many residents' dwellings were invaded by the deluge. State Farm Insurance spokesman Matt Greer said about 2,200 flood-related homeowner claims have been filed with his company from the District, Maryland and Delaware and 700 more from Virginia. State Farm is the nation's biggest home insurer.

Federal flood insurance claims are still being tallied, and no figures are available yet, said James McIntyre, a government spokesman.

The broadest impact has probably come with lesser, but maddening, residential intrusions of water.

Along with sodden carpets and basements, residents have been left with individual tales of the flood, which they tell as if recounting a bad horror movie.

Sherkiya Wedgeworth described an assault much like Garcia's on her basement apartment on Colorado Avenue NW in the District. "It was coming between the floorboards," Wedgeworth said. "It came from the walls. You just have no control."

She said her landlady gave her a bucket and towels. She also bailed with a plastic butter container.