Flooding???

We finished the three week marathon that was Great Lakes, Pennsic and GenCon. It was brutal at times but we made it and I am glad we did all three events. So what was my reward when I arrived home? A mysterious water leak in my house.

There is a trench or pipe that runs under the floors of the house. It's basically an air duct for the air conditioner on the roof. When I fired up the AC today to cool down the muggy house I heard a strange gurgling. It seemed to come from everywhere but we quickly narrowed it down to the pipe in the floor. It was completely filled with water. I tried sucking the water out with my shop vac but after thirty trips outside to dump the water I was making no headway. I went to the hardware store and rented a sump pump, but it was the kind you sit in a large flooded area, it didn't fit in the pipe. Back to the hardware store. This time we got a pump used for draining pools. We hooked it up and an hour later we'd emptied more of the water, but not all of it. I stopped and waited a few hours and the pipe has partially refilled. Of course this process made a huge mess in the kitchen where we were working.

I have no freaking clue where the water is coming from. We spent gobs of money to prevent just this sort of thing. There is a fucking rubber sheet covering the ENTIRE roof. The best we can figure is that the huge amount of rainfall has caused water to build up and leak through some small gap in our defenses. And water will just keep moving until it finds a way out. Maybe the water is from the side yard, maybe the roof, maybe a drainage line from the garage is broken. I have no easy way to know or find out. This is the pain in the ass of non-standard home construction. We are constantly trying to figure out how the place was built, why they did things the way they did, and how they fucked it up.

With the rain (hopefully) over I'm hoping the water leak will stop. If it doesn't then there's some kind of water line leak, which would be so bad as to be unimaginable. So far I don't believe this to be the case as running water lines make noise and I don't hear anything yet. What a great treat to come home to.