Quote:
Originally Posted by TerrySmith
Our goal is to get a house with a basement . . . . . .
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You might give a second thought to the basement idea, if at ll:30PM one night, you had gone down into your basement and seen your Bendix Aviation radio with its phantom dial, that had been in your family since new in 1947, along with with a Pilot 3 inch TV sitting on the floor underneath it and looking up at you with its one sad and very, very wet eye because it was drowning in a pool of water!
Most of the extra stuff was in our basement for short term storage as we had moved everything out of the family room to replace the crappy carpeting that the builder had installed in 2006.
We live on a hill and thought that our basement was flood proof.
The Pilot was underneath on the floor simply because it would fit between the Bendix's legs. These along with most of the original negatives of both my family and my wife's family pictures and all our prints that were never put in albums were in the basement.
I have rewashed hundreds of original photo negatives and a huge pile of photographs. The only photographic loss was a few prints where my wife got a bit impatient while we were soaking them prior to separating them and the emulsion pulled off.
The photos took priority, even while we were getting the water out of the basement. In fact, three months later, I still have about a hundred 1940s negatives sealed in water in a zip-lock baggie and frozen, to prevent mold, while waiting to be rewashed.
The Pilot had previously been repaired (but not restored) by the original owner, and I repaired it again in 1976, but it still had never been restored. Before the flood, it still worked but the CRT was getting a a little dim.
I moved the Pilot to the garage, popped open its case and hosed it off, and left it there to dry, and the cabinet does not seem to be hurt. Of course, this will mean that this set gets its long overdue electrical restoration.
The Bendix was left in place and moved to blocks and I wiped off the legs with alcohol to prevent mold. It has dried without any visible damage.
All of my remaining test equipment was in the basement, and while it did not get wet, it lived in very high humidity for over a week.
The actual biggest flood loss was from the wall of books that were moved from the family room to replace the flooring. We were able to dry the older books with almost no damage, but some of the newer ones were a total loss.
We never were able to determine the exact cause of the flood, but a freak localized storm with over 6 inches of rain in three hours helped. (A farmer's rain gauge about a mile from me overflowed at 6 inches. A rough estimate gave about the same amount in an empty solvent container that I had left in the back yard to air out before storing it. The official rain gauge at the airport about 10 miles north, was 3.5 inches. The other nearest official gauge 20 miles south of me was knocked out by the storm and did not register. In the subdivision where I live, only three houses in a row were flooded, and mine was the center one.)
James