So how was your day?
My morning was spent watching the wind-driven water rise over our seawall, all the way to our house. This video was taken from our second-floor bedroom window. The dock straight ahead and not fully submerged is ours, our backyard runs from the dock to the house and was completely underwater with white caps. You can seen the patio furniture.
It’s by far the worst in the almost 7 years we’ve lived here, and the worst in memory of a neighbor who’s lived on the street 28 years, with the exception of hurricane Sandy. As with hurricane Sandy, which in Rhode Island was only a tropical storm, it was a storm of perfectly bad timing — an astronomical high tide in the cycle plus a wind pushing water up the bay with gusts heading right our way.
It’s a strange feeling having white caps just feet from your house. Fortunately, the damage was ‘relatively’ mild.
We’ve never had the crawl space flood, we have a sump pump to keep it dry from any rain and ground saturation issues. But the river pouring thousands of gallons into it swamped the pump in minutes. It took several hours of utility pumping to get the water down to a manageable level so the normal sump pump could be serviced and put back in service.
The good news is that the water never reached the living space, the rise stopping about 6 inches below the first floor. Had the first floor flooded even by a few inches, it would have been very expensive.
We don’t carry flood insurance. We dropped flood insurance several years ago because the cost was becoming exhorbitant. We were paying $3500 per year for only 90k coverage with a 10k deductible. So even with insurance, the first 10k was on us. We calculated that if we could avoid major flood damage for 10 years, the saved amount would cover moderately bad damage, particularly when factoring in the deductible. If we could get away with 20 years, even serious damage could be covered by what we saved. The likelihood of catastrophic damage — e.g. the house being knocked off its foundation or serious structural damage — is extremely low, since we are not directly on Narragansett Bay, so we never will get the type of storm surge you see hitting Florida coastal communities, or southern Rhode Island during the Hurricane of 1938.
Of course, this rare perfect storm was an excuse to, you guessed, predict that we’re all gonna die (or at least be flooded) in 12 years.
As for me, I’m staying just where I am, thank you. I plan to enjoy the boat more than ever this coming summer, and the grandchildren are getting old enough (barely) to come along.
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