After a steady day of basement pumping, we were looking forward to a rain-free day. By evening the flow had visibly slowed and we thought we had turned the corner. At sunset, some storms popped up to our south, leaving us with some incredible sky.
These are Mammatus clouds named after, well, look at their billowing roundness and you can probably figure it out.
A bit later, after the formation passed by a little further. It was a relief to have these unforecasted storms miss us. But that ended at about 11:00 in the evening when a big cell camped over us and dropped another 2.5 inches of rain on us. For variety, it also dropped hail, but not large enough to damage the plants. It stopped about 1:30 am. So another 2-3 hour sleep night for me. We are perilously close to bad things happening in the basement – so I’m staying home from work to deal with whatever may happen in regards to pump failure, blown fuses, or power failures. More strong and severe storms are forecast for Wednesday night – it would be nice to get one dry day under our belts.
Since 9:30 Sunday morning we’ve all (except Martin) been on 4 hour shifts manning the pumps. The basement doesn’t have a sump pit, so we have to manually turn the pumps off and on, according to how much water comes in. If we leave them running, they will burn out the motors, so, I ran network cable down so we can at least watch netflix movies online on the laptop or update blog entries.
Our friend, the sump discharge hose!