NEW ROCHELLE, Ny - Early this past Sunday morning my father and stepmother, Anthony Heller and Elizabeth Cornacchio, were distressed upon waking, to find water leaking into the basement of their house in lower Westchester, a blow from Hurricane Irene, the 700-mile-wide storm that wreaked havoc on much of the east coast last weekend.
After experiencing floods in the same house twice before –flooding in 2007, and again in 2009 caused significant damage to the basement portion of the house, which subsequently required renovations each time – my parents had hoped to have better success this time around. In the days before Hurricane Irene hit, my parents, like many home-owner residents of Westchester County, busied themselves with making preparations for the storm. They stocked up on food staples like bread and milk, scoured the local stores for batteries, and purchased gasoline for their back-up generator, praying that obtaining such provisions would be the biggest of their worries. But unfortunately, although the addition of French drains and a new sump pump roughly six months prior to Hurricane Irene, lessened the impact of the storm, it was not enough to prevent flooding entirely.
“We realized we had a problem when I got up about 6:30 am and found water leaking out of the furnace room, and the sump was filled with water,” said Anthony Heller, a long-time resident of New Rochelle. “So my wife made a brilliant suggestion – ‘Let’s get the shop vac’ which we did.”
“We then spent 7 or 8 hours vacuuming about 800 gallons of water,“ said Elizabeth Cornacchio. “We would let the shop vac fill about two-thirds of the way, and then put all the water into the sump.”
The alertness, early rising habits, and quick action of residents proved invaluable in the face of Hurricane Irene and helped stave off flooding for the entire day. But Heller considered their biggest accomplishment beyond the scope of vacuuming water. “We rescued the house from catastrophe without our 22 year old daughter.”
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