Floods Suck part 1

So for the last several days Aerin and I along with our friends (who we are sooooo lucky to have) have been pumping water out of the basement while salvaging, organizing, scrubbing rust, repairing, and laying things out in the yard to dry.  It's far from done and it's even farther from fun, but we're making good progress.  Let me back up for minute and explain how we came to have five feet of water in our basement.  Oh, and did I mention the basement is where my recording and animation studio is?  Well I should probably mention that. 

I was counting tips Saturday night at work.  It was about 2:45 am. My friend Zach comes back to tell me Aerin has been trying to get in touch with me because there's been a little flooding in the studio.  Nothing serious, but she wanted to know if I wanted her to move anything just to be safe.  Looking back it's absurd we used the word "flooding" at that point.  I now know that what we were experiencing at that point was a few puddles.  The flooding would come later. 

So I grabbed a squeegee from the bar and headed home.  Zach said he'd come by when he was done in case I needed any help.  I told him it was probably nothing but he came over anyway.  The floor down there is really uneven, so there were a few places where the water was pooling a couple inches.  No big deal, we'd just squeegee it into the sump pump and call it a night, right?  Hmmm.  Why wasn't it going away?  I just squeegeed that spot.  For some reason we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. 

Then Zach found the leak.  Or the first leak I should say.  There's a five inch square-ish hole in the cement.  Normally you can look in and see dirt and rocks - the foundation, I've always assumed, although I've never understood why it was there. Days later it was determined to be some kind of poorly designed drain.  So water was coming up through the hole.  Obviously this was going to be a mess, so we called Eddie to bring a wet/dry vac.  Eddie is one of those guys that not only has every tool know to man, but he has really good ones and usually 4 or five of each thing.  "What size?" Eddie asked me.  "Oh the smallest one you have would probably be fine." replied the idiot.  Lucky for me, it just wouldn't suit Eddie's personality to show up with a five gallon vacuum.  It's more fun to show me how cool his biggest one is.  That turned out to be for the best.

We started moving a few things that were in puddles at a somewhat leisurely pace.  That was when I saw the water squirting through the cinder block wall behind my studio computer.  Holy shit.  Time to pick up the pace.  The panic began, although in a few minutes my idea of panic would never be the same...