Flash flooded

Yesterday I already finished typing a long post about Ateneo losing the game and such, and I was already going to press the “Publish Post” button when suddenly a voltage drop occurred and sent all that work into a waste of a 1-second power outage.

I was fine with that. I’ve taken the universe’s little practical jokes many times already to be used to it. But what happened last night was something different altogether.

It was a hard rain that lasted only an hour or two, just a little bit of Milenyo left over. What perhaps most people don’t know is that us folk people in Rizal were flash flooded after that.

We were just about to sit down to dinner when my dad said that it was already flooded outside. I was bewildered; of course who wouldn’t, the rain already stopped. I checked outside and saw a raging flow of flood water, right outside our gate. Nothing new mind you, but as I was watching it I saw that the water level was rising. First, slowly inching up our lawn, then up our driveway, and slowly creeping up to our house. That’s when we started to evacuate our stuff to higher ground. My computer, our furniture, DVD’s, books everything we could move we did as we raced with the rising water. Inevitably, the water entered our house and covered everything in fine muck. We had experience with this kind of thing before, but with my parent’s taking precaution by raising our house it was unexpected. Soon enough the waster was gushing through our house’s doors, but by then our furniture moving was finished. Eating dinner with my legs submerged in floodwater hasn’t been any of the things I wanted to try, but it was a new experience nonetheless.

We went up to our terrace to watch the still rising flood but we witnessed something more terrifying. A loud crash and sound of rushing water signaled the collapse of the walls that protected our street from the creek behind our houses. You see, a creek runs through our village, and with luck it so happens to run right behind the houses of street. This wall has been built, rebuilt and repaired through the years of seasonal rain and flood that turn this small creek to a raging river, but with the recent passing of Milenyo it weakened the dike with falling trees and battering force of wind and water. At least three sections of the wall collapsed, two behind the houses beside ours. We watched as our neighbor’s furniture was washed away. We started to worry about our house too, but thank God we didn’t suffer the same fate.

After a few hours the water started to recede. During that time I just took pictures and videos. Before midnight the water has already gone down to knee level, if your standing on the street that is, or enough to leave our house.

I spent my first sleepless college night throwing out bucketfuls of flood water out of our house, shoveling, scraping and moping mud off our floor, hosing down furniture, and generally cleaning up our house while still videotaping and taking pictures of it all.

This morning you could see the damage that that flashflood did. We are ankle-deep in the slipperiest softest mud, and you can see the neighbors salvaging what they can after the whitewater – or should I say brown water washed away all their stuff.

I didn’t go to my only class today, because I’m still mud in, and there are still more things to be cleaned. I did become the unofficial documenter of the devastation our street experienced. I got like 50+ pics and 5 minutes of video. I can’t post all those pics here in my humble corner of the blogosphere, so that’s why I made up my mind about getting my own multiply account. Yeah, I think that’s a very good idea.