Kansas Flood

Spring semester: day twenty-nine

This morning, when I got up, I was determined that today would be a productive day on many levels. I emptied the dishwasher, did the dishes I had left in the sink by hand, ate some leftovers (and prepared to clean out the fridge) and I put my comforter in the washer to wash it (I try to do this every two or three weeks or so at the most). I came back upstairs, talked to Daisy for a while to wish her luck on today's job interview, which she had rescheduled by the offices for 2PM, and relaxed a little bit. With my big responsibilities of the day taken care of, I went back downstairs later to put the comforter in the dryer and refill the cats' food bucket.

First of all, the cats were acting strange. They were avoiding the laundry room, and skittishly running around it. I at first chalked this up to them being excited that they were about to get fed, but then I noticed something odd. Water. On the floor. Not in puddles, mind you, but soaked into most of the laundry room floor's carpeting.

This. Is not good.

I ventured into the laundry room to find a small nightmare of a mess on my hands.

Let me, first, describe the layout of my laundry room -- it's an open room that has open doorways on either end. On one end, behind a wall, is my bedroom. On the other end is the downstairs bathroom (the "cat room," where I keep their litter box and food/water), and slightly beyond that is the squared-off, spiral stairwell that leads back upstairs to the rest of the house. On the wall perpendicular to the washer and dryer is the furnace, and next to that, the door leading into the garage.

Yes, my comforter had finished, but what I found wasn't that great. The washer and dryer sit on a linoleum floor specifically cut and angled to hold a washer and dryer. Below the washer is a floor overflow drain, like what you'd see in a shower in a YMCA. This drain is there, specifically, as a secondary drain, and serves a dual purpose -- coming off the furnace is a water-condenser pipe that's hooked up to the air conditioning unit out back for condensation purposes (I'm sure most of you have seen one). That pipe snakes down along the side of the furnace and under the washer to rest on top of that drain, so that the condensation will drain into it. Other than that, it's just a simple floor drain that doesn't see any use.

Well, today it saw some use. When I came into the room, it had overflowed and had soaked my carpet. Not heavily, or anything, but enough to wet it over most of the laundry room. The drain itself, and the tile surrounding it, was covered with a thick, brown/black sludge. Fuck,  I thought. The first thing I did was start sniffing -- I smelled nothing. This was a good thing. This means that it was not sewage. The water had receded and had gone back down the drain, so I immediately went upstairs and got all the dark towels I had to soak up the water from the floor and carpet. Placing them strategically to soak up everything, I set one down at my knees, folded it, and bent down to examine the drain and the sludge. I stuck my finger in the sludge and, very cautiously, brought it up to my nose.

Dirt. Mud, specifically, not poop. Soil. Ground dirt. This was groundwater. Not even washwater from the washer -- there were no suds. This was slightly brown, slightly mud-chunked groundwater.

It was only then I began to slowly piece together what had happened.

Keep in mind that over the course of the past week, we have had not one, but two massive snowstorms. When snow melts, it soaks into the ground. When an area has been under a drought for a long time, as Kansas has, not all of it can be absorbed immediately -- there's lots of runoff, culverts fill up, etc. That drain is connected to the ground, and runs out to be dumped somewhere into the groundwater table in my yard or under the street into the city's drainage system, but that's the only drain in the house that drains specifically into the groundwater system, from what I can tell -- it's an overflow drain that connects to the drainage system of the washer. When the water table gets high enough with an overflow drain attached to a washing machine in a below-ground basement, what happens when a load of laundry fills that drainage pipe? It kicks it back. Kicks back dirt, apparently, with it, because the water has nowhere to go in a saturated ground or an already-filled drainage culvert where it comes out the other end. Remember how I said the melting snow on my street was creating, basically, rivers of water running down the ditches? Yep. Everything began to fall into place.

It also slowly came back to me that this had happened once before, during the summer of 2010 (I think; could've been '09) when it rained for nearly a month straight. I cleaned it up the same way then, and waited a day or two before I did any more laundry. I only remembered this because during that time I was wondering whether the shower, sink, and toilet upstairs all connected to the same drainage system and if running or using them would cause the same problem (apparently they don't, because it didn't).

I let the towels soak up all the water that they could hold, and tossed them into the washer. It was time to perform an experiment, to be sure -- I ran the washer and let the towels wash. My washer has two drainage cycles, as most washers do; the first drains the soapy water, and the second drains/spins the clean water out so that the washed items can be thrown into the dryer. I waited. Filling the washer didn't cause an overflow or anything like that, so my secondary thought that possibly there had been a leak in the water pipe that fills the washer was unfounded. I now knew that it was certainly a drainage overflow issue. As predicted, when the washer hit its rinse cycle, after about twenty seconds, I saw the drain fill with soapy water from beneath the grate and begin to bubble over onto the linoleum. I turned off the washer and watched -- after about the same amount of time, the water receded and went back down the drain. This proved my further hypothesis that there wasn't a clog, otherwise it wouldn't have re-drained, and certainly not so quickly -- it was just too much water for the outspout to handle all at once, but it wasn't anything wrong with my plumbing or my washer. In order to drain the water and continue to the rinse cycle, I had to stop and start the washer several more times, allowing the water enough time to drain out of the pipes each time. I did the same when the rinse cycle dumped its water as well, and during the final spin. Looks like I'm not doing any more laundry for a few days until the snow outside melts off completely and dries up a bit more so that I don't have to worry about overflow, and when I do run another load, you can be damn skippy that I'm going to watch the drain like a hawk to make sure that shit doesn't happen again.

As for the carpet, the actual soil didn't reach it but for a few small spots, and it wasn't nearly as soaked through as I thought -- four or five absorbent bath towels soaked it all up to the point where it was just damp at best afterwards; and I put my powerful oscillating desk fan on the floor down there to dry the rest of it off and plugged in my dehumidifier on the opposite end of the room to further dry everything up. How ironic that the day after my new warm mist humidifier arrives in the mail to help my allergies and keep my skin moisturized in the house, I have to use my dehumidifier for the first time in months to dry out the carpet in my basement.

Oh well. It could've been worse -- I could've soaked down the entire downstairs of the house if the washer hose had snapped, or something. The water also didn't get into the dryer or furnace, either, which is really comforting. Electrical fires are bad, mmkay?

Anyway, crisis (apparently) averted.

I got paid today for the third time this semester; this helps offset the $50 or so worth of books I had to purchase yesterday for comps studying. They arrive on Monday and Tuesday. I also finally received my C.K. Williams book in the mail today, so I can get started on him this weekend as well. I was planning to do that before the flooding drain debacle derailed a good chunk of my afternoon. The drain debacle occurred during Daisy's afternoon interview with another company, one who will be conducting another follow-up interview with her on Monday afternoon as well. It went well; after months of searching, she'll have had three interviews within the span of a week, which is wonderful -- and I hope she gets one of the two jobs.