A mammoth undertaking

The weather late yesterday afternoon was absolutely atrocious. There was a major storm, pretty much directly overhead, with non-stop lightning flashing between the clouds and thunder rolling around the hills. The wind was so strong that the trees in the wood opposite were thrashing around alarmingly, and indeed one came down and completely blocked my neighbours’ drive. Fortunately, it missed both their house and garage, and the local land-owner (whose tree it was) sent round some men that evening with a chain saw and JCB who made relatively short work of clearing it away.

The rain at the height of the storm was biblical in its intensity. I don’t think I’ve ever seen rain like it. The drain at the back of my house got blocked by all of the vegetation being swept down the hill and off the roof, to the extent that I had to go wading to unblock a veritable pond that was several inches deep and threatening to encroach on my back door. I fetched a trowel from the garage to excavate the blocked drain, and saw that I had bigger problems. The howling gale had driven the torrential rain through the small gap underneath the garage doors, and the entire double garage was flooded to a depth of about an inch! That took a considerable amount of sweeping to get the water outside where it belonged. My gutters couldn’t cope with the sheer volume of rain, and I think that several of them got blocked with debris coming down off the roof. I’ve been round most of them this afternoon with a ladder and a bucket, clearing them out, but I think that at least one of my down-pipes is going to need pressure-washing to clear it. 

However, given the strength of yesterday’s storm, I think I got off relatively lightly. I can’t see any leaks from the roof, so that seems to have remained watertight, and the stuff in the garage will dry out eventually. I’ve never known the garage to flood like that before, but it’s clearly something I’ll have to look out for in the future. Though hopefully a storm of yesterday’s magnitude will remain rare.