I woke up feeling a little better than yesterday but not really good enough to work, but I needed to check on the pump as we had two to three more days of rain coming. I got all bundled and waterproofed and drove down around 10am. I’m glad I did as I got to see first hand just why the sump pump keeps blowing the breaker. Coming down Newport Blvd the police had the street closed down at McDonalds going both directions down to 21 st street. Northbound it was closed up to Carls Jr. I had to cut over to Balboa Blvd to continue down to spag. I’ve never seen the streets so flooded. It was like a river in front of Woodys. 21st street was completly underwater up and over the sidewalks the entire way. A couple delivery trucks were farther down and starting to back up the street so I just pulled on the the driveway/sidewalk and parked. I wished I’d taken some more pictures but I couldn’t stop on my way down and by the time I left it was too late.
Well the parking lot was flooded from the wall all the way to the front doors, in fact it was at least 6 inches deep at the front door. Scott the closing manager had made a dam with some cloth tarps so that was slowing the flow of water inside. It worked pretty good as there actually was less water inside than yesterday.
When I opened the backdoor water started to drain out of the restaurant, I futher eased the flow by opening the emergency exit door to the front room. Now the water was squirting in the front door running through the lobby into the front room and out the back door into the drain.
It wasn’t raining when I arrived but it had been raining very heavy just before hand. I now knew why the pump hadn’;t been doing its job. the pump can handle the entry way, but once the water overflows the lip of the entrance there is no way the pump can pump out the entire neighborhood, after all it’s just pumping the water back into the same body of water at that point. The water was receeding when I had arrived after 15 minutes or so it was about an inch deep at the entry lip so I put down the lobby carpet pad as a dam and fired up the pump again. It ran for 5-10 minutes, overheated and tripped the breaker. I let it cool a while and turned it back on, this time it finished draining the entry and stayed on.
I then picked up some sandbags and reinforced my dam. The flooding was a result of two conditions colliding. When a very high tide is predicted the city goes around the pennisula and shuts off all the storm drains to keep the harbor from flooding the streets, this presents a problem when you have heavy rain during the valve shut off. The rain water has nowhere to go, so then the streets flood. I fact the streets were flooded much worse before I got there as I later noticed how high debris had collected on the Newport Blvd side of the building. It had climbed all the way to our gateway and had just started to trickle in the emergency door in the back room. That puts it somewhere between 12 -18″ deep at the gutter. In fact I noticed that a large trash bag had floated down Newport Blvd all the way from McDonalds (it was filled with McD trash) and ended up in our driveway on 21st street.
I then picked up a ham omelette at Charlies Chili and headed home for a date with the couch and a couple Bond flicks.
