Former Daily Herald editor finds surprise, amusement in basement flood

Editor's note: Gail Kahover is a former Daily Herald editor who lives in Libertyville and wrote about this week's rain and flooding that left 3 feet of water in the basement of her Libertyville house.

A small, dirty green Kermit the Frog has come to represent our experience so far in the great flood of 2017.

I found the stuffed Kermit on the floor near our hot water heater Friday. An apparent victim of a torrent of water, he lay awkwardly sprawled on the floor, covered by dirt and sludge, and surrounded by some sort of nasty-looking slurry. His expression was one of surprise, yet amusement. That stuffed animal summed up our sentiments exactly - surprise and amusement.

First, the surprise part. Libertyville had nearly 7 inches of rainfall Wednesday. I was returning home from a conference that day, but my husband had been sending texts showing the rising water in our backyard. For a while, the yard looked like lakefront property in northern Wisconsin.

The water apparently came in a deluge, flowing down from the road to the west. The water came in such force it broke through parts of a retention wall and crashed through the window wells and into the basement.

Based on the residual water marks, the water rose about 3 feet in our fully furnished basement. It left behind a tumbled mess of TVs, furniture, kids' games, DVDs, an overturned refrigerator, and an awful lot of wet boxes and lost family memories.

Now, for the amusement. The power of the water flowing through our basement as a wave left a roll of toilet paper in the toilet and a card game wedged under the lid, a coffee table that floated across the room with three TV/game controllers on top left perfectly dry and untouched, the mattress askew with the sheets and comforter pulled back like someone was getting ready for bed, and a boot standing upright and filled with water.

Outside, the flood uprooted a large pot of plants. We found the pot, but no plants. A neighbor's wheel barrow moved across our yard and wedged under our air-conditioning unit. And most amusing, we found the metal heron sculpture that had adorned our backyard pond in the front yard of a home nearly a block away.

So, Kermit really did have the perfect expression on his face. Yes, this has been an awful ordeal, especially with the loss of years of memories and the pain (and cost) of cleaning up the mess. Even as I write, workers with a restoration company are noisily sucking the water out of the carpeting with a very large vacuum hose.

But I am thankful the water didn't reach our main living area, and my precious family photographs were safe because I brought them upstairs a few weeks earlier to work on a project. And, although it was totally unplanned, we did finally clear out all "stuff" in the basement, a job we had been putting off for years.

So, thanks, Kermit, for the inspiration. Although you didn't make it to the salvage pile, you sure brought a smile to our faces.