So I wanted to got to bed early after an evening visit to the zoo in high humidity that was rather taxing since our zoo is in the hills – so the path is long and a constant up and down.

Then there was a thunderstorm – earlier than the latest weather reports which only hour before said that there wouldn't be any rain.

And then the basement was full of water. There is a built-in water barrier, but it was too low. When I got down there was water up to the lowest stair. Behind the barrier with a closed steel door there was so much water pressure that the storage room on the other side, the storage cupboard and the guest room which doubles as auxiliary storage was flooded as well.

After I manually closed the connection to the sewer water was still coming in from a more than one meter high pipe that is used to collect condensation from the chimney. I unplugged the washing machines, the water pump for the garden and the heater. Then I hastily left the room and closed the door with a lot of trouble.

The last five hours were removing water – first with a bucket chain with help from the neighbours next door, then the neighbour from across the street fetched a pump. Our second pump which I tried to get going earlier has a leak and does not work at all.
His pump can pump approximately 1000 litres per hour and it was running for at least three hours.
Then a friend arrived with a second working pump and started to pump from the storage room. I had already managed to decrease the boiler room's water level by bucket into then reconnected toilet that the previous owner though was a good idea to include and is often the main cause of trouble. To be fair – if it wasn't there all the water would have gone through the washing machines and maybe even through our kitchen sink/dish washer one floor up.

To make matters worse the neighbour from above 1) opened the door to the boiler room and made the water amounts unmanageable and 2) started moving some of my food from the storage cupboard around making everything unusable. Before that only the things in the lowest container was destroyed. I've lost 10 kg of rye and naked oat each and some very expensive rice.

The guest room unfortunately had carpet and below that some sort of plastic tilings from the previous owner. And my guitar amp with builtin speaker plus an additional speaker, my second bass speaker (Markbass ), the subwoofer of my stereo, an old high quality microscope that I've inherited from my grandmother and other things.

I'm not sure if any of those things are salvageable. After all the buckets of waters and countless fillings of my wet-dry vacuum cleaner I'm not really able to move and then all the things from the room had to be moved to the garage as well. Then the carpet and the plastic tilings.