20,000 Gallons of Water

That’s what has ravished my apartment: 20-freaking-thousand gallons of water. The casscading (lol?) effects of the flooding have ended in our apartment building being condemned, fuzzy mold creatures growing everywhere, and bio-hazard signs all over the place.

It all started three weeks ago when the owner of our building decided to have the roof replaced. At the end of the second day of roof construction, the workers covered the roof with some flimsy pieces of tarp and, low and behold, it rained that night — something incredibly rare in San Francisco. All of the rain water ended up getting caught in the tarps until they burst, flooding the top floors and a few floors (including ours) below it.

Fast-forward a few days: the flood repair people have moved in, there’s huge, industrial dehumidifiers all over the place, and they’ve torn out the ceiling in many of the apartment units to inspect for water/mold damage not visible to the lignomat non-invasive scanners. Great, things are moving forward.

It’s late one weekend night and all of the sudden the fire alarms go off… and so do the sprinkler systems. One of the machines the flood repair people had brought in had inadvertently set off the entire sprinkler system.

Zomfg.

Right now we’re just trying to figure out what all was destroyed, dealing with f($&@%)ing insurance companies, and trying to put our lives back together. Needless to say, this has put a damper (lol? again?) on everything else I’m working on. I’ll be a bit less active while we pack up, move, fill out all these insurance forms, find a new place, unpack, etc etc etc…

Our unit is by no stretch the worse of the bunch. Some of my neighbors had to vacate immediately, some have no beds (’cause they’re now sponges) and are sleeping on the floor.

I’ll be rejoining the online world soon, just need to take care of stuff in meat-space first.

Related posts:

1. Moats and boats and waterfalls

Posted under Life, San Francisco by Austin