Amazing moment: A huge wall of water crashes through the window of a family’s home in Utah during historic floods
- Whitney Redd filmed a wave of water breaking through her basement window
- It happened amid a historic storm on Tuesday evening
A family in Utah was completely surprised when a massive wall of water burst through their basement window during a once-in-a-century flood – just two months after they renovated their home.
Amazing footage posted online by Whitney Redd shows her sons carrying a keyboard and other equipment out of a basement office on the night of Tuesday into Sunday when water began to seep through a window.
She was heard screaming “Oh no” as water began to soak the floor of her Orem home before her husband realized her efforts were useless.
“It will break,” he warns, shouting at his family: “Go back, go back.”
Almost immediately after his warning, a wall of water crashed through the window, throwing an office chair into the air and causing Redd to scream in fear.
Amazing footage on the Internet shows how a wall of water crashed through a family’s basement window on Tuesday evening
Whitney Redd said the flooding occurred in the basement, which her family uses as her in-laws’ apartment.
She said the flooding occurred in the basement of her nearly $850,000 three-bedroom home in Orem, which the family uses as a home for her in-laws.
Redd told KSL-TV how her family ran to check on her in-laws as an evening storm moved quickly through the city of nearly 100,000 residents, dumping massive amounts of rain and golf ball-sized hail.
“So we ran over and noticed, you know, a leak,” Redd said of the family’s discovery in the basement.
Her husband then “tried to get through the window, get the hail out, get the rain out, just tried to get things out,” she said, realizing it was futile.
“(My husband says) ‘It’s going down too fast. There’s no way we can get this all out. Get out of the room, get out of the room,'” she told Fox 13.
Then the family moved back – and the water flowed in.
The footage shows Redd’s sons trying to get a keyboard out of the basement office as water started to seep in.
The basement was under 3.5 to 60 centimetres of water
Redd later described the incident as “surreal, just surreal, (with) all the water coming in.”
“We were at Niagara Falls recently and it was the same at home,” she said.
The house was under water, which was about 45 to 60 centimeters deep, but no injuries were reported.
“Everyone is safe, it’s just a house,” Redd said. “It really sucks, but it’s just a house.”
She said her family has since put fans in the basement to dry it out, and neighbors have helped clear out the apartment — removing the floorboards and almost everything else.
Unfortunately, the flood occurred just two months after the Redd family renovated their basement following a sewage backup.
The Redd family had just renovated the basement apartment of their home in Orem two months earlier.
“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 renovation costs.
As of Sunday evening, more than $5,000 had been raised for the Redd family, while residents across the city are still cleaning up after the freak storm that dumped 0.75 inches of rain in just 20 minutes on Tuesday.
This is close to the desert city’s monthly average of 0.95 inches, with the city only receiving about 13 inches of rainfall each year.
