🌊 My Apartment Flooded! The Worst Happened In All The Right Ways?

A recount for why I disappeared (kinda) for the past few days

Two days ago, I published this message as I sat on the floor to my bedroom, faced with water flooding my living room.

I had woken up after lying in bed for an extra hour on Saturday morning, almost stepped out of my bedroom to find that my living room had been turned into a swimming pool. That is if swimming pool water was brown with sediment.

Let’s Backtrack: How Was Your Bedroom Not Flooded Also?

This is the first piece of what went right in a sea of disaster. I live in a one-bedroom basement apartment with several cool designs. I’ve written about the baseboard heater in my bathroom that appears right under the towel hanger, which keeps my towels nice and toasty in the winter.

There were two key designs to my apartment that minimized damage.

[1] I had a sump pump

I call it my apartment pit, because it’s literally a pit in the ground where my dehumidifier automatically drains into via a hose. It’s also equipped with a sump pump that drains the water out of this pit, which is usually just dehumidifier water.

Unfortunately, while the sump pump is the origin of the water, the sump pump is also the reason that my apartment flooded less than other apartments in my area. My property manager came by to tell me that specifically because the sump pump tried its best until the rain overwhelmed it and it shut off, it was actively pumping out any water that came in.

So, I’m conflicted on this one. I had a flood because there is this pit in the ground. I also had less of a flood because said pit is equipped with a machine that pumps out any water that might come in.

[2] Different Elevations to Rooms

The other piece that honestly saved my life and items the most is that my apartment is segmented into different elevations. My living room, where the pit is, has the lowest elevation. My bedroom, bathroom and laundry room are elevated on a platform about 12 inches.

The combination between this little sump pump that pumped until it couldn’t and the platform meant that the water never reached over the platforms.

This meant that bathroom was dry and I could pee in peace as I waited for someone to vacuum this water out.

It meant that my clothes and mattress were safe from needing to be thoroughly dried out, which is much more of a hassle here.

These two apartment designs meant that my apartment was mostly ready for a flood response, which is such a smart design given that it was renovated as a basement apartment. It also had tile flooring so drying was quicker than needing to undo carpeting.

After Wild Encounters With Landlords, I Found A Property Management Company That Worked

I had terrible property management before I landed with the current one. A lot of them didn’t check move-in / move-outs and would take up to 72 hours to respond to maintenance requests and then another week to actually schedule in the maintenance to happen. Yet others would just try to offload the cost and labour to us as tenants. It was a constant fight.

If my place had flooded with any of these previous people, I would have been thoroughly stuck. They wouldn’t have answered the phone on a Saturday morning, nor have the flooding cleared up in any reasonable time.

When I settled to live here in this apartment, I knew that living in a basement came with its risks, even with clever home designs and careful choices. I knew that climate change will impact this housing choice more than any other location that I would live in. But, rent would be double for safety.

Read that again. Rent would have been double what I pay for non-basement apartments.

That’s why anxious me had such an anxious spiral before settling on this lease. I knew I had no other financial option, and that I would have to settle for this risk of a flood. And this risk may come true (as it did, this past weekend). I could only try to mitigate with conscious choices, and we saw some of that happen these past few days.

The property management that I finally ended up with had someone on-call 24/7. They sent their maintenance team within the day on most requests and the maintenance guy is lovely.

So on this fateful day when I woke up, hadn’t brushed my teeth, sloshed across the muddy floodwater in hopes that I wouldn’t get electrocuted by the submerged power bars, I knew that I had trust in that something would be done.

The on-call staff, whom I’ll nickname Sam, picked up right away on this fateful Saturday morning. She sounded groggy, but also calm. I calmly shared that I was underwater. She calmly told me they’d send someone right away.

They didn’t come as soon as I thought they would, but as I learned, it was because the whole damn city had flooded. The de-flooding team that came in thanked me again and again for not being angry, to which I profusely thanked them right back like some bowing war because no sir,

It is I who should be grateful that you are here, within the hour, to de-moisten this terrible tragedy.

The person who had vacuumed all the water even took the time to individually squeeze each yarn ball that had fallen into the floodwater so that I could potentially salvage my hobby supplies. INDIVIDUALLY. SQUEEZED. What a guy.

It is I who should be grateful that you are here, individually de-moistening each yarn ball so that I may have hope to hobby again after this ordeal.

After the flooding was cleared up, Sam personally came to check in and photograph for damages. Her check-in wasn’t just for the house, but also for me as a human being. She thanked me for calmly sharing that I was in a flood because although other houses had been hit harder by the floodwaters (absent clever house designs), I was one of the few living in the basement area and directly impacted by it.

It is I who should be grateful that you checked in, made sure checks were done the IMMEDIATE day after so that fixes to the apartment could have been immediately done within the week.

The flood was a terrible thing to wake up to, but the people who had been a part of this entire experience had made it easier to deal with in a calm way. It appalls me that anyone spent any time berating these folks for literally trying to make things better.

(Contrary to the Canadian stereotype, there are actually some assholes out there???)

Personal Choices That Worked, Funded By YOU, Dear Readers

There were also a few personal choices that ended up being really helpful.

Remember the kitchen trolleys I bought using the Medium bonus? I ended up using them as book storage rather than getting a real bookcase for the ~aesthetic and also so that I could flexibly move the trolleys to partition vs. open up the living workspace that I have.

These turned out to be flood-ready too because the bottom level of the kitchen trolley is elevated to allow for the wheels. This means that unlike a bookcase where my bottom level of books would have definitely been under water and damaged, all of my books were elevated enough to be untouched by the muddy water.

So yes, that means that you, dear reader, had also played a part in making this disaster of mine less of a disaster. Your reads, responses, highlights and shares to social media funded the medium bonus that in turn funded the purchase that meant I no longer left my books lying on the floor in a stack.

Other than the kitchen storage, I never bought other storage solutions. Instead, I just kept things in the cardboard boxes that would come in anything I got shipped. The advantages of this low-cost solution include:

1. Not spending money on storage. Because moving along was already expensive.
2. Doubly not needing to spend money on moving boxes because I only keep the boxes that are large enough to become moving boxes. Smaller boxes are flattened and painted so that they can become upcycled shipping for anything I sell on Poshmark.
3. When they got wrecked by the flood, I felt absolutely not guilt in just letting them dry out in the sun and then placing them into the recycling box, to be collected. Nothing was “damaged” because it was all meant to be disposed of, to begin with. I wasn’t sad because I would now have to replace hundreds of dollars worth of storage solutions.

Finally, my snack box was so empty it actually floated on the water. So on this fateful Saturday morning where I already slept in far too late until I was super hungry, and while I was too scared to hop into the water because my power bars were submerged, I took out my trusty room Swiffer pole and dragged my floating bag of croutons over.

Yes, I had croutons for breakfast that morning until the maintenance staff came by and were able to pass me my rainboots.

Not All Of My Choices Were Smart, Though

Gratitude for almost everything going right, from personal to property management choices to kind people all around, I did have a few valuable things damaged.

Remember the five fun summer purchases that I got mid-pandemic? I bought a Roomba and gave him googly eyes because solitude was taking over and I was too proud to admit it?

He lived in the main room and was unfortunately entirely submerged. Given that some of my chargers survived the plunge yet others didn’t, the Roomba is still in the max dry mode to see if somehow, after all of that, he survived.

In the meanwhile, here are a few poems that I had written about my pandemic buddy:

I also lost a few chargers but not the electronics themselves. I had procrastinated and eventually decided against having a cable management system under my work desk, accepting that my wires will always be tangled under my desk and my Roomba will always have difficulty vacuuming under.

Because the power bar and charger set were on the ground, they were definitely submerged. Luckily, they were quickly replaceable and by the time that I’m writing this, I have a replacement charger for everything.

But You Were Alive and Active on Social Media? 👻

Here’s the thing: if I died tomorrow, the eerie thing is that I’d have content scheduled up until December. My social media and online presence is a hybrid of pre-scheduled content and me jumping on in the moment to yell my thoughts into the ether. I’ve found that this hybrid has been the best in terms of not feeling like I have to be “on” all the time, while also maintaining actual connection instead of running a “bot-like” account where everything is promotions and pre-scheduled content.

For something like Medium, I’m somewhere in between, where I scheduled my daily poetry prompts ahead of time in batches of 30. I write them whenever I have idle (read: impatient) waiting time and have a workflow where I just save them up. Then, one afternoon a month I sit down and actually schedule them for posting with titles and pictures.

Other pieces that I submit to publications and more blog-like updates (like this one!) are written in real-time so you get to see the real me, not me from one month ago. (Though frankly, now that I’m in my late twenties, every month is almost the same.)

What went right despite the disaster: Though I haven’t been able to write organically in real-time, having a system of batch-scheduled pieces that are regularly posted ensured that I had some income coming in even though most of my energy was focussed elsewhere.

The System That Worked

A lot of past experiences led me to this one point where I was able to pick up from such a big event like this, dust myself off, and get up again.

I didn’t have to worry as much about damages, because every piece that went into my landlord’s original renovation of this basement space, my property management’s disaster plans, and my design choices mostly worked to minimize damages.

I didn’t have to worry about losing the ability to earn money, because I knew I had systems in place from last time to allow for passive income to come through. Not working for a few days wasn’t going to make a huge dent in my income. More importantly, I didn’t have the pressure to not fall off the algorithm, which actually has a longer impact on creators because it may take several months to catch up again.

On platforms like Medium, Tumblr and Twitter, where scheduling is an in-built part of the platform, I had no problem. On Instagram, where you have to pay extra for measly barebones scheduling apps, it’s hard and probably why I don’t lean heavily on this platform anymore.

Final Words

I find that I cope with my anxiety by joking about my anxiety, but this time, my anxiety made sense. In fact, maybe it’s not anxiety. Slowly, I’m realizing that it’s just a realistic appraisal of the real risks that others ignore because they might not have to take similar risks in order to afford to live.

It’s not lost on me that this flood happened because of uncharacteristic torrential rain for the region. You’ve guessed it — it’s probably related to climate change. Despite the higher risk of flooding and despite having already experienced a flood, I’ll continue to live here because it’s about half the price of apartments that are above ground.

I know some people in the past have thought that I was being extra. Having gone through SARS as a Hong Konger, I topped up basic supplies through January and February just in case COVID-19 might hit hard. It might not have, and I would have had a nice supply of TP and instant noodles. It did hit hard, and I didn’t rush supplies in March during a panic. You wouldn’t believe how much ridicule I got for these choices, planning ahead being labelled as “anxiety”.

Similarly, for this apartment, I had friends who said it wouldn’t be a big deal to have something flood over. Someone told me that their cottage flooded over all the time and by now they’re used to it, and it’s no big deal. I didn’t have the heart to point out to them that while a flooded cottage sucks, a cottage is still a second home. This is my first and only home. During COVID-19 restrictions, this is also my workspace.

There were design choices they wouldn’t have thought of, or wouldn’t need to think of, because replacing those items with money wasn’t a big deal. The storage piece is a huge one. I have friends who are at a place in their life where they have the money to care about the aesthetic and matching of furniture with other furniture, and they can’t fathom that I, fully 27 in years, accepted living like this. Instead of holding it in shame, as I’ve done so in the past, I’ve realized that our incomes are different and while to them, replacing real, expensive designer furniture would have been within budget, the only reasonable replacement I could flexibly have was for cardboard boxes that also served potential moving purposes. They told me I wasn’t living because I wasn’t enjoying things the way they were, yet I found joy in what I have. And I can only do that if I’m not worried about putting the basics on my table, something they don’t have the experience to consider from their lens.

A lot of things went right despite the disaster, and I have a lot of people to thank. I have also learned to shut out a number of voices given that sometimes, people dish out advice based on their own experiences, unaware and not able to see that advice may not … fit. In fact, especially because that advice doesn’t fit, it engenders shame in others for not having had enough to make the advice work.

This flood reminded me of exactly where I am. I am fortunate, and in community support and clever design, I recovered from this quickly. I am also reminded that this is just the first flood. I’m not even sure we can mitigate the effects of climate change at this point, but I also find that because of this, a lot of people have given up.

You can’t. Don’t give up. It matters.

This story has a happy ending precisely because, despite the disaster, small steps added up to make a difference.

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I have this faint hope that my roomba friendo will awaken after the deep moistening but rational thought tells me no. So, please take a moment and mourn over my one and only pandemic friend. ❤ You will be missed. PS, I PUBLISHED A BOOK 📚

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

^ by Nada Chehade