DETROIT — We’ve gotten the bitter reminder every day for a soggy, soaking week. Water always wins. Water is the Nick Saban of weather forces — relentless, unstoppable, mercilessly pounding defenseless opponents, such as drywall and carpeting.
In the midst of Detroit’s historic flooding, people are in varying stages of misery. My misery is not as bad as others’. My sympathy goes to those whose lives were completely upended, who lost family keepsakes and expensive appliances.
Does anyone really know what to do when the water knocks? Detroit’s aging infrastructure doesn’t, as pumps failed in the deluge creating a used-car parking lot on I-94. Many drivers don’t, many residents don’t. I didn’t.
Clueless me, I unwittingly invited the water in and now have two dumpsters full of wet junk (it wasn’t junk a week ago!) in the driveway. Five days after water rushed into my basement in Farmington Hills, I’m down to the final painful decisions. Carpeting has been torn out, drywall ripped down and wood cabinets dragged out. A dozen fans and dehumidifiers provide a loud, constant background hum.
Now it’s at the personal stage, albeit the trivial stage, and like many others, I’m forced to consider a major purge. Not everything got wet, but the volume of stuff requires a frank assessment.
Which mementos, collected during 32 years in the sports media business, do I keep? Of course, the framed pictures, autographed footballs and bobbleheads gotta stay. But do I really need three media guides from the 1998 Tigers with Bobby Higginson on the cover? Should I hang onto the stacks and stacks of newspapers chronicling Detroit, Michigan and Michigan State sports? Which of the water-logged souvenirs should I try to preserve — the knapsack from Super Bowl XXIX in Miami (the Lions did not participate), or the spiffy briefcase from Michigan’s trip to the 1993 Final Four in New Orleans?
For the record, I pared down but mostly saved the media guides dating to 1989, including the 1999 Michigan State football yearbook with a semi-smiling Saban on the cover. The indomitable Saban wasn’t going to succumb to no stinkin’ dirty water.
No one can fully prepare for something that happens a few times a half-century. I’d never had a significant basement leak in 21 years. Water has occasionally pooled in the lowest area of the backyard but never dared cross a line. When I battle nature, I win.
Ha, that’s what I thought last Friday at about midnight, as the storm was raging. I heard gurgling from the basement and crept down to find a slowly expanding stain on the beige carpet. Water was seeping between the two sliding glass doors, so I did what anyone with water in the house would do. I tried to get it out.
Leaning on my extensive training in geophysics, I figured I’d open the doors, squeegee the water out, then close them quickly to tighten the seal. It was dark outside, and in a crisis like this, why waste time turning on more lights to better assess the situation?
I yanked open the doors and gasped as a six-inch wall of water poured in, carrying leaves, sticks and muck. I didn’t realize the water had overwhelmed the entire backyard and covered the deck, which was now literally floating. By the time I got the doors shut but not fully sealed, the water had begun its trek, seeking out every corner of carpeting, from the rec room to the den to the bedroom. It never got higher than an inch because it had so much room to spread.
It was still raining, water was still trickling in and I was engaged in a vicious battle armed with a mop and a bucket. I decided, at 1:30 Saturday morning, to drive through the downpour to Meijer for supplies — a wet vac, more mops, a hydroelectric dam — but due to the weather or lingering effects of the pandemic, Meijer wasn’t open 24 hours.
Back home, I collected every rag and old towel and pushed them against the doors, which slowed the onslaught. The next day, I bought a wet vac and slurped up water for about eight hours, but you couldn’t even tell the difference. It was time to surrender. I started calling restoration companies, and I don’t know if you believe in higher beings, but my higher being at the moment is Ray Howard. He owns OnPoint Restoration and came over Sunday with lots of equipment and an honest assessment. This is roughly how the conversation went.
Ray: “We’ve been cleaning out basements around the clock, especially in Grosse Pointe. This is gonna take 4-5 days. The carpeting and part of the walls will have to go.”
Me: “But, but, can’t you just use your super big machines to dry it out and save everything?”
Ray (eyebrow raised): “Do you know what’s in this water?”
Me: “Uh, looks kind of dirty.”
Ray: “Pesticides, bacteria, pathogens … ”
(I’m thinking a thorough cleaning and disinfecting would take care of it).
Ray: “… and probably animal feces.”
Me: “TEAR IT ALL OUT!”
You have to work quickly in disasters because when it rains, it spores. (Nothing better than a bad black mold joke). I consider myself lucky — this wasn’t sewage and I got tremendous help sooner than anticipated. As Ray surveyed the pool table, couches, cabinets and sports memorabilia, as well as old chairs and one enormous 60-inch Pioneer Elite tube TV that hadn’t been used in 15 years, I had to ask.
Me: “How does my clutter compare to the others you’ve cleaned out?”
Ray: “Oh, not even close to the worst. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff people have.”
Me (quietly): “I knew I wasn’t a hoarder.”
The next three days, as workers diligently sawed and chopped from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. — they broke that gargantuan TV into 100 pieces and it was glorious — I made the calls.
Insurance company? “No, you don’t have flood coverage. Sorry. Not many people do. You might want to check with FEMA if there’s disaster relief. Save receipts and take photos. Good luck!”
City of Farmington Hills: “We’ll try to get someone out there to see if it’s a clogged drain. But rain like this can overwhelm anything.”
Numerous reconstruction companies: “Please leave a message at the beep.”
Ruthlessly, Mother Nature spent the past week running up the score on us. At the height, my backyard “pond” was about 50 feet around and five feet deep, not quite enough to qualify as lakefront property. As a final humiliation, I looked out the window the other night and saw a fat raccoon squatting at the water’s edge washing his hands (paws, whatever).
Water is life-sustaining, in addition to basement-staining, and my goal is to turn this into a cleansing event. It felt oddly liberating as I threw boxes into the dumpster. It felt stupid when I went back an hour later to debate whether I should take the boxes out of the dumpster.
I felt like the kid who resists tossing his baseball cards, and now my Mother (Nature) was ordering me to do it. The biggest decisions await, such as how to reconstruct the basement, how to address the outside drainage issues and whether that old couch should be retired to the dumpster.
It’s day by day, drip by drip, dreary but not defeating. It definitely could’ve been worse. Saban’s perfect hair could’ve gotten stained, and my Norwegian troll figure collection from the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics could’ve drowned. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that nothing is considered junk until it gets wet. Also, if you wage war with water, you figure out quickly what’s worth saving.
