Thanks to the storm....
 

it has been a long two days.
the set up is that my basement leaks a little bit. nothing major, just a drop here and there under normal sub-1inch rain conditions. we usually don't even check.
the problem with my house is that it was apparently built by a crack head. the sump pump hole is at the highest point in the basement and the floor is so ridiculously far from level it doesn't even fill up unless the rest of the floor has 3+ inches of water on it already.
well, sunday afternoon, around 3ish. i went down to look caus eit was a lot of raina and i noticed the usual spots were damp already. as i watched damp turned into standing water and little puddles started to form.
call in the flood towels and the old shop vac and it quickly degraded into a game of trying to keep up with the water. some time during this whole thing my bro went and got a new shop vac that was bigger than our old one. 14 gallons of capacity and it was filling up in under 15mins from sometime sunday evening until prolly midnight last night.
now things are finally under control, the shop vac is all messed up from running nearly 24horus straight, and the losses only add up to a few wet boxes and some odl magazines that i dropped whiel trying to clear the area.
i did realize in moving all this junk how many car parts i have down there, so expect to see a flood sale thread in the classifieds soon :)
time for some rest and video games to celebrate my defeat of the storm of '07 :p

sounds like you had a lot of fun. :) welcome to the world of wetness and BS. :)

my basement is about the same way...and i've been through what you mentioned more times then i care to think about
what i'm probably going to be doing is cutting a small trench around the entire perimeter of my basement, that leads to the sump pump

When we moved in our house, it had basement water issues. The basement was damp and it stunk, got some water whenever it rained. 99% of it was traced to poor drainage, gutter placement & window well issues. I rerouted some gutters, did some regrading around the house, dug out all the window wells to about 6’ and filled them with gravel (they were pure soil right up to the window sills), added covers, and Drylocked the basement walls. This week - no water. I haven’t ever heard the dehumidifiers run. We have 2 of those with pumps so I can ignore them.

6+ before puming started and we've gotten water twice in 20 years. got 2 pumps goin and were still holding at an inch. its so wet more just keeps coming in. not nearly as bad as some of the houses my FD went in.

Tim my dad said he had a similar condition to your own. He said at it for at least 13 hours straight yesterday trying to get the water in our basement under control. He has spent the last few years trying to get the water routed away from the house, but with the excess water some new leaks in different areas of the basement came to be. We dont have a sump pump, but are going to look into investing in one. Sucks, wish I couldda been there to help my dad out. My hat goes off to all of you.

my neighbor has no gas PSE&G are here chopping up the street. LOL

NJSPEEDER,
I felt your pain this week. I was manning the shop vac non stop from 7:00 PM Monday night to about 10:00 PM Tuesday night. I then was down to every 30 minutes until about noon Wednesday. I only got about 6 hours sleep in that timeframe when the Mrs. took over for a while. Luckily the flooding was on the non finished side, so I didn't lose anything of value.