Detroit / Royal Oak Flood

Hello everyone! For those of you who weren't aware, last week's storm caused some massive problems in the city of Royal Oak, where I live and work. 3 feet (1 m) of sewage backed up in our basement, where I store all of my photographic equipment except for the cameras and lenses. Pretty much all of my studio equipment (lights, light modifiers, light stands, backgrounds, background stands, studio samples, several studio albums) were ruined. Fortunately, I have insurance that will cover almost the entirety of the loss, but it is going to take some time to sort out all of the details before I will be able to replace the equipment. Good news is that I still have all of my cameras and lenses and one tripod, and will make the very most out of natural light until my equipment is replaced. And most importantly, we are all safe.

Our street, normally a boulevard. This was taken at 7pm, two hours before the rain stopped.

7:30pm, when we first realized there was sewage in our basement. Since many of the bottom boxes collapsed, already a lot was ruined, but we bailed out what we could.

Ughhhhh, what a mess!

Before leaving the house for the night, we moved all of the boxes that we were able to save from the basement into our garage. We did this for two reasons: 1) Some of them were lightly contaminated, and 2) there was no room in our house. Unfortunately, the garage also flooded overnight, so we lost many of those boxes.

As we cataloged all of our lost items for our insurance company, we came across a worm that found itself at home on my Euclidean geometry book from high school. This "bookworm" made us smile a little bit on an otherwise difficult day.

Huge mess of stuff that we came back to the next day, after the sewage had mostly drained.

The aftermath.