Fun In Costa Rica

Late yesterday afternoon, we had almost two inches of rain fall in a short period of time. It was an extremely intense monsoon-like rainfall.

Our house sits at the bottom of two slopes. The top is where the mango and banana trees are, then there is a slope to another flat level, and finally another slope down to our house. There are berms on each flat area that are supposed to direct water into the deep ditches along the property side.

This time, the rain was so intense that the berms could not hold it all and torrents of water started washing down the lower slope, flooding the back of our house and actually coming into the house through the back door. There is a square drainage hole near the back door but it could not cope with the influx of water.

This is the drainage hole:

You can't see it in this photo, but there is a pipe outlet at the bottom edge of the hole.

In no time at all, this outlet was incapable of coping with the rushing torrents of water and quickly overflowed. There was a lot of plant debris filling the hole so I leaned over to get my garden trowel which was stuck in the soil, thinking I could clear the hole and help it drain faster.

As I reached over for the trowel, I fell into the hole - right arm and shoulder first. Lance was out there too and both of us were already pretty wet from the pounding rains, but now I was totally soaked from head to foot.

It was like something from an "I Love Lucy" episode. We were laughing so hard - it was pure unplanned slapstick. Lance pulled me from the hole and I ran inside to discard the wet clothing and take a shower. Then I started sweeping out water from the house ... one great thing about having tiled floors and no carpets is that cleanup is easy. We used all the old towels and rags we had to help mop up the water in the house.

This morning's laundry consisted of our wet clothing from last night and the towels .... all needed several rinsings to get rid of the mud and plant debris. My garden trowel is MIA .... presumably sucked into the drainage hole vortex.

The last I saw of the trowel. The drainage hole is under water to the left of the trowel.

 

 

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