Once One of Our Hamsters Drowned in the Sump Pump Hole

 

The House With the Damp Basement

It's raining today. It rained yesterday. I was talking to my neighbor and she mentioned that all the houses at our end of the block used to flood when it rained. Not anymore. Chicago started something called The Deep Tunnel Project in 1975. They dug over a hundred miles of tunnels over three hundred feet below the city. Tunnels nine to thirty three feet in diameter to catch the rain and keep it out of our basements. It works, so far.

When I was a kid in Tinley Park, Illinois, there was no such thing like the Deep Tunnel. There were no sewage treatment plants. No, the developer who built our subdivision in the late 1940s simply ran drain pipes from the houses to Midlothian Creek, which ran through the middle of town. So when it rained and the creek rose, all that effluent would come back up those pipes and into the basements. My dad fought long and hard against the rising tide over the years. At first there was nothing he could do. It would rain and the basement would fill up with water. In that water would be turds from the entire subdivision, bits of shredded toilet paper, and an occasional balloon. At least I thought they were balloons. We made the best of the situation by turning our sandbox into a raft and floating around like pirates in our subterranean sea. Then Dad got the great idea of installing a pipe into the drain in the floor, where all the waste was gurgling up from. He called it a stand pipe. It was about four feet or so tall and when it would rain we could watch the water slowly rising towards the top of that pipe. It did kind of work sometimes. However, there were those extra heavy rains where the creek would overflow its banks and that stand pipe couldn't hold the flood back. That's when it would turn into a sewage fountain with turds popping up out of it and falling into the rising tide of our basement. After the stand pipe failed, Dad had a hole dug in the corner of the basement and put a sump pump in there. It was a big improvement over the stand pipe and worked well as long as the power didn't go out. So we still had the occasional flooding in our basement, but not as bad. Dad's final fix worked the best. He sold the house and we moved to the other side of town.