A little Sunday surprise…

Well, not quite surprising after hearing about the rains of several years ago here in the area where sections of roadway were washed away, but not the thing I was expecting when I got to the shop on Sunday morning. The shop sits at the low point of a dirt parking lot and water, behaving in a predictable fashion will follow the path of least resistance.

In the case of the building where the shop is housed, it was straight through the front door several years ago when the previous tenant was here. After that bout, the parking lot was graded and a drainage path for water was added. It’s been several years since the grading and a whole lot of Dukes of Hazzard wannabes spinning donuts in the parking lot – who can blame them, it’s fun – so the drainage channel isn’t quite a clean as it once was. Combine that with the super heavy rain we had early Sunday morning and the high winds and, well, the interior of the shop got a little wet with water running under the front door.

Compared to what happened to some shops in Houston during that hurricane last year, the water in the shop was nothing. I am lucky. I spent an hour or so cleaning up. Nothing was damaged and all I was left with was some dried dirt on the cement floor. The tenant before me was the butcher and in the back of the shop, there are two drains in the floor where their big cleaning basins were. The drains are handy because that is exactly where the water flowed and drained. If the drains weren’t there, I would have had a much bigger problem.

Soon after I moved in, I found out about the flood that the butcher had and purposely set up the shop so that if water did flood through, it would drain and anything that is on the floor in it’s path wouldn’t be affected by water. Actually a few cardboard boxes with freewheels and chains waiting to be sent to the recycler and one bike box got wet. Minor stuff.

Puddles on the floor greeted me.