Taking Back The Basement With Towels, Sump Pumps

In Marshall Keys's house on Thomas Street NW in the District's Bloomingdale neighborhood, the water came up through the toilet and bathtub.

"It overran the bathtub and spilled over onto the floor," Keys said. "When I woke up Monday morning, the entire floor was covered with this black sludge. It's a nasty cocktail that's mostly dirt, but it's disgusting nevertheless."

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, also used the towel method at his home in Alexandria.

"We pulled up the carpet and put down all the towels that we could find," Turley said "We did what all homeowners did: We started with the bad towels, then used the good towels and ended up with the best towels."

Turley said that although he was not amused, his three young boys were. "They think a flooded basement is like something out of the Hogwarts school of magic," he said, joking.

His storage room also flooded, and outside, at the worst of the storms, his street "looked like a Level 4 rapids," he said. "It was amazing."

When he went to his office in the District, he found that it, too, had been drenched -- inundated by a ceiling leak. His desk "puckered up like a raisin," he said. His files turned to mulch. When he turned on his computer, it groaned and died.

"I have to admit I was trying to think of what I had done to offend God," he said, laughing.

Some hardware and home improvement stores, meanwhile, were emptied of hundreds of basic flood-fighting tools by Sunday, and the chains have been rushing truckloads of water vacuums, sump pumps and dehumidifiers to Washington since then.

A sump pump, for the uninitiated, is an electric device that empties a sump, or hole where drainage collects. The word comes from the Middle English sompe, for marsh, which is what many people suddenly found in their homes this week.

Bryan Schlosser, assistant manager at Lowe's in Alexandria, said his store sold 100 to 150 sump pumps in recent days and 200 water vacuums. He said desperate customers have even been buying decorative pond pumps -- anything to move water.

Jane Roten, Home Depot regional vice president, said her company's resupply trucks were arriving then. One tractor-trailer might resupply five stores -- each store with about 250 sump pumps, for example. There are 25 Home Depots in the Washington area -- a lot of pumps for a lot of basements.

Servpro, a Tennessee-based company that removes water and cleans up after floods, said it got 400 calls to its Lanham office Monday. Richard Hargrove, a local supervisor, said there are 53 Servpro operations in the area. "All of them are getting calls like this," he said.

Hauling services are also swamped, taking away sopping carpets and furniture. "We had our record high, in terms of bookings, on Monday and Tuesday," said Nick Friedman, president of Kensington-based College Hunks Hauling Junk.

Alas, his customers included his parents and his company. "We actually did my parents' house this morning," Friedman said. "Our office flooded as well. We had to get rid of some of our own furniture."

Although hauling junk is messy, wet carpet can be worse. A truckload weighs 1.7 tons, Friedman said.

Plumbing and heating concerns also have been busy -- servicing sump pumps. Flooding from a knocked-out sump pump might be covered by insurance, a local State Farm agent said.