Tornado Warning and a Flooding Basement

After work tonight Josh and I came home, took a nap, and then headed to Peoria to do some shopping. I wanted to look for some new work clothes (which I didn't find) and then went to dinner at Ruby Tuesdays. Afterwords, we started to head towards Washington to do our grocery shopping and found ourselves in a horrible storm. The roads in Peoria were flooding and visibility was nearly zero. By the time we got out of Peoria and were heading over the bridge things cleared up so instead of heading home we decided it would be fine to just stick with the plan.

We had just finished our grocery shopping in Walmart and were headed to the checkout when we heard sirens and then an announcement came over the speakers that there was a tornado warning and everybody was to head to the back of the store to take cover. We sat there for about thirty minutes while the storm passed....at least we were in the folding chair isle and actually had a place to sit! When that passed we checked out and headed home. As we were driving home we noticed that all of the ditches in our neighborhood were severely flooded. Our neighbors across the street have a lake where their lawn used to be.

We got in, put the groceries away, and Josh headed downstairs to check the sump pump. Miraculously he caught it just as it started to overflow - the piece of crap had stopped working! So we ran upstairs and got buckets and towels, opened the window, took the screen out, and started bailing. It was coming in faster than we could bail, though, so Josh stuck is arm down the hole and started feeling around and pulled on a few things, and just like that, it started working again. So we cleaned up the mess (it only flooded in the storage room and didn't make it to the carpet or drywall) and are now babysitting to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Tomorrow we will be purchasing a backup sump pump. Fun times.