A Utah family was caught completely off-guard when a huge wall of water crashed through their basement window during a once in 100-year flood event – just two months after they renovated the home.
Astonishing footage shared online by Whitney Redd shows her sons racing to move a keyboard and other supplies out of a basement office as water stared to leak in from a window on Tuesday night.
She could be hear crying, ‘Oh no,’ as the water started to soak the floor of their Orem home before her husband realizes that their efforts are useless.
‘It’s gonna break,’ he warns, yelling at his family to ‘get back, get back.’
Almost instantly after he warning, a wall of water crashed through the window – sending an office chair flying and forcing Redd to scream in fear.
Astonishing footage shared online shows a wall of water crashing through a family’s basement window on Tuesday night
Whitney Redd said the flood occurred in the basement that her family is using as her in-law’s apartment
She said the flood occurred in the basement of her nearly $850,000 three-bedroom Orem home, which the family uses as an apartment for her in-laws.
Redd recounted to KSL-TV how her family ran to check on the in-laws as an evening storm moved quickly through the city of nearly 100,000 people, dumping a massive amount of rain and golf ball-sized hail.
‘So we ran over and noticed, you know, some leaking,’ Redd said of the family’s discovery in the basement.
Her husband then started ‘trying to get into the window, trying to get the hail out, trying to get the rain out, just trying to get things out,’ she said, when he realized it was fruitless.
‘[My husband is] like “It’s coming down too quick. There’s no way we’re getting all this out. Get out of the room, get out of the room,”‘ she told Fox 13.
At that point, the family moved back – and the water poured in.
Footage shows Redd’s sons trying to move a keyboard out of the basement office as water started to leak in
The basement was inundated by a foot and a half to two feet of water
Redd would later describe the incident as ‘surreal, just surreal, [with] all that water coming in.
‘We’d recently been to Niagara Falls and it was like that in our home,’ she said.
The house suffered about a foot and a half to two feet of water but no injuries were reported.
‘Everyone is safe, it’s just a house,’ Redd said. ‘It’s really c****y, but it’s just a house.
She said her family has since run fans into the basement in an effort to dry it out, and neighbors have helped clear out the apartment – removing the plank flooring and nearly everything else.
But unfortunately, the flood came just two months after the Redd family remodeled their basement from a sewage backup.
The Redd family had just renovated the basement apartment of their Orem home two months prior
‘Now they’re back to square one. It’s devastating,’ Redd’s sister wrote in an online fundraiser to help the family with the second round of remodeling expenses.
It had raised more than $5,000 for the Redd family as of Sunday night, as residents across the city continue to clean up from the freak storm – which dumped 0.75 inches of rain in just 20 minutes on Tuesday.
That is close to the desert city’s monthly average of 0.95 inches, with the city only receiving about 13 inches of rain each year.