So yeah...my basement just flooded..

Hear i go expecting to fall asleep watching a hilarious episode of Archer when bam, some water line busts and my basement starts going under. (My room is in my basement.)  Luckily, since there was a fire here recently i've developed the necessary skills to run the hell upstairs in 2 and a half seconds, wake up my family, and run half naked to some neighbor i barely know.  
 
2 hours later most of the damage has been stopped before it could get bad thanks to the firefighters and cops who came by super fast.   But yeah, stuff sucks dick. We didnt lose anything that can't be replaced, but I feel on a whole new level for the people experiencing serious floods up in North Jersey. My thoughts go out to them.  
 
Anyone got any interesting flood/fire/shark attack stories I can tell to my sister so she'll chill out?

Any reason why a pipe should just suddenly burst in Jersey?

its like 22 years old i guess? your guess is as good as mine, water company decided to wait until morning to come out

talking about jersey makes me think of kevin smith. ima go watch one of his Q&A videos now bai

Every year when it storms I have to turn on two gas generators (because the goddam power will go out), go outside, lay down sump-pump lines, and pump away water from my house. It's usually pitch black and freezing and the water is filthy.  So I feel your pain, brah

well my house burned down 2 years ago. It sucked, badly, but it brought myself and my family together... a lot... also we got a dog... which was very cool. A very emotional experience, for sure because.. you know... no... no you dont... i lived there for 15 years. but, what is lost can be replaced easily!  
  
I lived in southern california and the Santa Ana winds finally showed their true power... bitches... anywho, we're rebulding and I'm hoping we'll be done by October, for my birthday :P Thank god for filipino contractors who claim that they can put up a house in 2 months :O 
 
@Ahmad_Metallic: did you enjoy cop out at all? I didn't mind it... now I'm going to go watch Clerks II. and that man needs to make another Q&A dvd

Our basement was flooded once, when I was 17 and my room went completely under. I was in shock. It was a broken pipeline on the street ( a mainline of the city ). We got loads of money from insurance but everything I owned vanished. I felt like half of my life was eradicated. All my clothes, books, games, photos etc. just vanished and I literally own only the shirt on my back, strange. I am still scared of heavy thunderstorms due to the noise of water running down the windows and the roof.

When i was living in Canada years ago, after a very bad thunder-storm i remember our basement flooded. It was pretty shitty, as my dad had all is Architecture blueprints, and his 2 awesome computers very badly damaged. 
 
I also had my N64 and Super Nintendo in the basement at the time. Had to replace them :( 
R.I.P. to my old Nintendo consoles.
 
Although 1 question... why do people have their bedrooms in the basement? If there is a fire in the middle floor, you're pretty screwed are you not?

5 years ago my basement flooded on one side (my side) because of a shit ton of snow melting and there being a slope running towards the house. Luckily it wasn't that bad... ripped out the carpet and dry wall on that side and laid down the stuff that goes under the carpet after drying it all out. Then re did the wall and what not. Luckily the guest room is never used so I moved most of my stuff in there until the "renovation" was complete.
 
Luckily no pipe burst. Hope nothing too bad was damaged/destroyed. Do you have insurance for that stuff?

Here, in Ireland, there are very few houses with basements.
 
I've always wanted to have one though, get my subterranean on.
 
Reading this thread makes me think they're only suitable for storing water sports equipment, though.

in many homes, the basement leads to their backyard so going upstairs isn't the only way out. 

Well my school got flooded when a pipe from the nearby sewerage plant burst, surrounding the school in 1 metre of shit trapping all of the students and staff inside. Thankfully it didn't flood into the school since it's raised but it was still pretty awful. Couldn't go to school for two days since they had to disinfect it.

a few years ago we had a massive storm come thru North Texas that dumped tons of rain ( I was still living at my parents house at the time) we lived at the bottom of a hill and our back yard was like a river, the "little house" which used to be a guest house turned into a storage building got flooded. Nothing too important got ruined, but it took months to drain the water out of there and fix it up so nothing gets wet if it happens again.

Sorry, but I have to admit a lot of that sounded hilarious to me, even though it's a terrible experience to go through.  I'm glad I've never had to endure those types of situations.  Only thing crazy that I can say was when the fire alarm at school rang and we did the normal, slow and stupid evacuation method in Junior High.  After everything was over with, we learned some cook had just burned toast.

That's a really sucky situation. Luckily it seems like your family's fine and I hope the material damage isn't too great.

When I was a kid we had a pipe burst on the lower floor of our two-floor house. All the bedrooms were upstairs and I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my dad yelling on the phone to some plumber or whatnot downstairs. Luckily the pipe had burst near the front door so we hacked away most of the door frame to let the water run outside and tried building barriers with towels and stuff. The water was eventually shut off after a couple of hours, but water had already flooded all of the first floor. We had to do a complete renovation of the floor and replace a lot of the furniture. Also getting home afterwards was tricky, because this happened in the middle of winter and starting from our door the entire yard was one huge slippery block of ice for the next couple of months.

This is a 4 year old thread. Maybe, just maybe, this isn't relevant anymore.