On Wednesday, 30 January I woke up around 9 am and heard a drip sound
through the intercom. I thought it might
be rain for it was a grey morning, so I did not pay much attention and prepared
breakfast for Otto and me. After having
it, around 9:30 I went in to Sela’s room so that Otto could cuddle with her
while she woke up, as usual. I came in
the room with Otto in my arms and when I walked around to the foot of her bed
my feet got wet. Having placed Otto on
her bed I splashed to the bathroom where the dripping got louder and there it
was: about two inches of water covered the bathroom floor. Water had sipped to her room and the carpet
was soaked from the beds to… let’s just say one third of her room was flooded. I saw that one of the sinks was full and to
my horror the faucet was on!!!! So here
was a rude, cold and very wet awakening for Sela. She said she had washed her hands at around
7:30 am and probably let the faucet on. But,
let me tell you people that must have been a good 4 to 5 hour dripping for the
amount of water. I spent a good part of
the morning with two lots of towels, stumping the carpet, collecting the heavy
dripping towels, to a spin cycle in the washer, then to the dryer, while I
stomped with the other lot of towels. Let
me tell you I was done with exercising when noon came around.
The flood experts came in around 1:30 and told us that
they needed to get fans a dehumidifiers going,
and that I should call my insurance because the bathroom floor was
showing 100% humidity/wet –don’t know what kind of gage that was, but it beeped
loud and measured 100%- and that the floor would have to come up, sooner than
later. So… while I was having four
classes in a row from 3 to 7pm, Roberto took charge of the situation while the
men came in and out, took Sela and furniture out of the room and proceeded to
install three fans in her room plus a dehumidifier and one fan in the bathroom plus
another dehumidifier. The breakers
tripped once or twice because they got overloaded or something. Roberto kept coming up to the school room to
give me details and get me to talk to the insurance people. Of course nothing was said about the fact
that ‘Sela had stopped up the sink and the draining hole on the edge of it so
that creepy crawlies won’t come up and give her a fright. We said that there was a flood because the
sink had backed up.
When I finished my classes and went in I found Roberto
and ‘Sela in bed trying to figure out whether she could sleep in there with the
noise of the machinery. I thought that
the humidity had overflowed to their brains.
So we had a big argument about the fact that she could certainly not
sleep in there with the wind blowing her hair off her head, with the dust that
was flying around from the fans under the carpet, the amount of wires and tubes
from dehumidifiers… I told Sela I would
call tio Carlitos so that he could talk some sense to her about this because
she would not listen to me and Roberto saw no problem. So finally, after we ate something, I called
Florence and told her that ‘Sela needed to sleep over and surprisingly, Sela
went as quiet as a lamb. I suppose she
realized that I wasn’t going to give in.
I had to wait until the storm passed and still raining I
took her to Florence and Brian’s house.
Since then, she’s been staying over there until the machinery is out. On
Saturday the floor was taken off except the around the toilet. The machinery was left in place until
Monday. The insurance adjuster is coming
on Monday morning. Just pray that it
covers the damages and that the replacing of the floor and the installing of
the padding and stretching and nailing of her bedroom carpet is done soon. We begged them to do so stating that she was
handicapped and in need of her bedroom and bathroom. We shall see because apparently the company I
called is not one of the ‘preferred’ contractors of the insurance so we’ll have
to deal with new people. Here are some
photographs.
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| Bedroom |
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Bathroom floor
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