Weekend with Water

We've spent the past couple of days dutifully pumping water out of our crawl space. We've had rain in Champaign on and off for almost the past week. Unfortunately, when the rain comes, it comes several inches at a time. The ground is saturated and the water has no where to go - most of central Illinois is dealing with flooding.

Some of Ron's plots have been standing in water since last Wednesday - not a good situation for a corn plant. Imagine dieing a slow death - one where you're being suffocated over a long period of time. That's what's happening to the plants right now. We're keeping our fingers crossed, but its not looking too promising. Several areas of the south farms here on campus have turned into small lakes.

We've also got standing water in our yard. Rain water from our neighborhood runs towards our street. We're pretty lucky as the street declines just a little ways to the west of us -- a couple houses down from us had moats surrounding their houses for a day or two last week. The standing water in our yard is coming from the hose we have running out the back door from the sump pump we have in the crawl space. For most people with crawl spaces, this isn't a problem, except our furnace is down there. And Thursday night, so was several inches of water. Most of the water was gone by Friday morning, except for the slow trickle of water the was filling the sump pump hole. And then we got 2 more inches of rain on Saturday. We've mostly caught up, but now it seems like the ground is just seeping.

A river runs through it - rain water moving through our street
Hopefully it will stop raining for awhile, we can get the furnace checked out, change the air filter, and turn on the air conditioning. Yep, no air for us for awhile. Yuck.