When Rita came through Houston in 2005, I "fled" to Austin. By "fled" I meant I took a long weekend to go see my fiance since I had a great excuse to do it. If you think people in Houston are bad about hurricanes, people in the hill country are even worse. When I got to Austin the talking weather heads were starting to forecast lots and lots of rain up here, and there wasn't a can of Spaghetti-Os or a case of bottled water to be found at H-E-B. Everyone was preparing to live in utter chaos for several days. Not to miss out on the fun of purchasing emergency supplies, I bought 2 large bottles of lemon flavored Perrier and some canned veggies. It rained about 4 drops and I drank my Perrier while everyone made fun of me for my "emergency supplies." But hey, water is water, and if we needed it, Perrier would have worked as well as Ozarka.
So that was the flood we were prepared for that never happened. A couple of years later, my house had the flood we were NOT prepared for thanks to tropical storm Hermine (horrible name, worse storm). It sat over the hill country for about 27 hours, raining off an on. But for about 5 hours, from 10PM to 3AM on September 7th, the heavens opened up above my house and the rains came down.
About 10PM I was in bed watching Rachel Zoe and Rob came in to watch the end (he secretly loves that show, I swear). Rob said the water was almost to the porch. At 10:30 he went to check again and opened the door to a lake. It was about 1.5 inches from coming in the house through the front door. We had noticed some water spots on our new wood floors earlier in the week, so we went to check the back french doors and noticed that if you smushed down on the board, water came up between the boards. Not good. So Rob took a push broom and started pushing water away from the front door for the next 3 hours, while I used towels to soak up the water coming in the back and occasionally went to sweep water away from the outside of those doors.
Water never did come in the front door (thank God), but the french doors and a couple of hardwood boards near them need to be replaced. The upside is while we were calling contractors about replacing the doors we decided to get them to bid out renovating our kitchen, so we should start that in the next week or two.
What, you wouldn't renovate a kitchen at 33 weeks pregnant?
