Taking Back The Basement With Towels, Sump Pumps

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006

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.

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.