"Well, a little rain never hurt anybody"
"Yeah, but a lot could kill you"
It was six fifteen pm on a Tuesday night. I was teaching pre-intermediate English to 20 twelve year olds in Ms. Ngoc's living room when all 20 students' attentions were ripped away from me and "The Stillwater Secret" on page 34. It was drawn away to my left, to the door that opens into the courtyard and onto the tiny street that led into many tinier streets that create the labyrinthine area between Doi Can and the other street whose name I can never remember. Seriously, labyrinthine is the only adequate word- I'm not just trying to make use of my now useless GRE knowledge. The "streets" are about 3 feet in diameter and curve in circles and sharp angles into a mess with 95% dead-ends and 5% escapes to the main streets. One weekend Bayley and I got lost for 35 minutes in this area and only emerged by the grace of God and our ability to say "Where is Doi Can?" in Vietnamese to many residents of the labyrinth.
But I digress. It was Tuesday night and the attention was caught by an enormously loud sound- rain. Now this is rainy season and it rains almost every day. Sometimes quite hard. But this captivated even the Hanoi residents' attention. I, being an expat, couldn't tell that this was especially hard rain and demanded my students' attention back immediately.
Two hours later when I was done teaching I looked outside and noticed it was still raining so grabbed for my poncho only to discover I hadn't brought it as it wasn't raining when I left the house. Ms. Ngoc offered me hers but I didnt want to have to return it and it was only drizzling so I decided to make a run for it.
"I hear there is flooding in your area," she said to me.
"My area? We live almost across the street from each other. I live maybe 200 yards from you," I responded quizzically.
"208? Yes, flooding," she confirmed.
"Oh, well okay," I said eager to leave, brushing off her concern.
I pedaled around the corner onto the tiny street only to find a low point with eight inches of standing water. Very surprised and concerned since I only had my cheap old bike, sandals and the tiny alley had a lot of holes and cracks, I jumped off my bike and walked it through the dirty, dirty water laughing to myself at the fact that it was really dark outside and I was biking through narrow alleyways with no light in pools of contaminated water.
I continued on through similar areas of alleyways full of water, now not stopping to walk my bike but forging on ahead instead. Only when I emerged onto Doi Can street I realized what Ms Ngoc had meant. The 75 yards on each side of my alleyway's entrance made up the lowest point of the very large Doi Can street. All of the rain that had poured down along about a mile's worth of street was now sitting in front of my street. A motorcyclist or two were pushing their bikes through the THREE FEET of water, trying to not get the water in their engines that would cause them to stall. A car passed through the water, creating a huge wave that washed onto my feet. More people were standing on the sidewalks out of the water just watching. At this point I called Jeff and the rest of my friends who were at Annie's goodbye dinner on the other side of town.
"Yeah, Bayley said the water was up to her waist and the house was flooding so she left," Jeff said.
And so I decided to push my bike through the lake to our house and see what the damage was. The water level was mid thigh in the middle of the street and my sandals kept coming off with the weight of the water. A cab drove carefully by me but still made a wave up to my chest. My street itself only had water halfway down it, thank goodness. I stripped in the entranceway so as not to drip in the house, put on my swimsuit and soccer shorts AND my GALOSHES and journeyed out to document the madness.
When I came back into the house I noticed a bowl Bayley had put at the bottom of the stairs on the first floor to catch the water. It was a quarter full but the kitchen had about a half an inch of water on the floor so I began to mop up using the kitchen towels. I turned on the fan, got rid of the excess water and began to make my way up the winding stairwell with a towel, wiping down the steps and the banister. The water appeared to be dripping through the middle so drying out was annoying but not too big of a problem. The fourth floor had quite a bit of water on the landing which took some time to clean up but I was feeling pretty confident about the house so I called the housemates at the party and told them not to worry that everything was fine.
About ten minutes later while mopping up on my floor I noticed water splashes on the front of Judith's door, which was closed. The water on the landing wasn't very substantial so I wondered why it would've been so high up on her door unless I had done it. Intrigued, I opened her door.
Inside, things previously left on the floor were now floating. Floating. Floating in water. About 4 inches of it.
I immediately started grabbing things that were on the floor and throwing them out onto the landing. Furniture, clothes, ipod chargers, hampers, etc. Then I went downstairs to Aaron's room on the same side of the house. Floating. About 3 inches of water. Again, throwing things out onto the landing. But with Aaron's room there was more to do- he leaves EVERYTHING on the floor. Clothes, shoes, dvds, hotpots, letters, tickets... Fortunately they hadn't left anything more electronic than an electric toothbrush on the floor. Once everything was out there was still the water to deal with. I called Jeff again and told him that he should calmly inform my roommates that they should now come home and everything was not actually okay.
Without a mop or wetvac, how was I supposed to get all this water out of their rooms? With an empty trashcan and a towel, of course! I saturated a towel in the water then rung it out into a trashcan then emptied the trashcan of water into the shower drain. The first bucket I did broke and the water went everywhere again. It was a low point. Then I did about 10 more buckets, alternating between Judith's and Aaron's rooms. Around this time Bayley and her guest returned to the house and we found more towels to speed up the process. We spent 45 minutes doing this, at about this time everyone else returned home to gasp at the situation which wasn't even bad since we had cleaned up so much! The floors were barely even wet!! Bayley, Kristin and I had a good laugh and what everyone else thought was "a disaster" since we (especially me) had seen it SO bad.
Later on we discovered that the guest room also had some water from the balcony AND that we think most of the water came from the top floor balcony and overflowed into the house and down the stairs. Aaron and Judith's rooms are on the low side of the house so the water flowed there.
While I was cleaning up with Bayley and Kristin they remarked how calm and efficient I was dealing with the flood. So I told them about my "flood experience". Park City Thanksgiving, toliet in 1990s, fire sprinkler in 1995 and the good old flood of April 2008 that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars to my house in San Clemente. They were impressed.
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