So, our neighborhood floods. We weren’t particularly surprised to find that out since a. we live in Houston and b. our sewer systems are older. We knew when we moved into the area that Nottingham was slated for new sewer systems – in 2008. That sounded good when we were moving here. That is until the street in front of our house has proceeded to trap us in our home 4 times in less than a year from flooding. The worst was yesterday. I wish I knew how much rain we had between 8:30 and 9:30, but I noted that the water in the backyard was creeping precariously close to the house. We also started getting water in our dining room from a faulty gutter.

With Joelle watching Dora, I ran outside to start dumping buckets of water from our backyard to the driveway. The water was up to the hardiplank line on the house! I had three buckets and the broom going at full speed. I didn’t seem to be making any improvements. I remembered a physics lesson and tried to rig the hose to start moving water out of the backyard (kinda like the fish vacuum concept). That didn’t work. I knew I didn’t understand physics.

While I was in the front dumping a bucket, a car stalled in front of our house trying to go through knee high water. My neighbors across the street and I, pushed the car out of the street to a driveway. I mentioned how high the water was in our backyard, so Jim came back to see if he could clear our french drains. They were blocked, but they also wouldn’t drain because they drain into the street in front – which was, um, blocked with water.

We’re left with not a lot of options… we may try to add gutters to the back of the house to direct water away from the backyard to the side yard, but I’m not sure how effective that will be. It’s really just a waiting game until they can fix our sewers. I did send a letter to our council woman to see if this could be expedited, but I’m not too optimistic. I sent her pictures of the swollen street…

The picture set is here.