Some rain...

What a day we had last thursday. We had so much rain falling in a few hours that we haven't seen anything like that before. It started thundering in the morning and when I took the children to school it was all dark and thundering all the time. Outside the school it also started hailing and looked so threatening so I said to the children that they could stay at home today. Daniele wanted to go anyway because he had a test he didn't want to miss. It rained really hard. As most newer houses here, we have rooms also in the basement and have had dirt water twice already in our bedrooms. I can now say that we are very lucky we had had problems before and therefore had installed pumps and a return valve, because they saved us this time and this time it would have been much, much worse. When I noticed that the rain water soon would get inside, I called Armando, who was at a course this morning and said that he couldn't get home because all the streets were flooded, but he explained me how to use our extra pump. So there I stood out in the rain trying to connect all the hoses, cords and plugs and get this pump to work. Finally it worked and this little pump saved us from getting more than just a few centimeters of rain water in our bedrooms. Carlotta sat on the stairs inside whining because she gets scared when I'm panicking and Sofia helped me with what she could. I was soaked to my underwear.
At two a clock it had stopped raining and I went by car to get Daniele from school because all the streets were full of water. There were lakes outside the school and lots of children hadn't gone to school today or had gone home earlier today. Later I heard that people in all Rome, and especially in our area, had had really terrible problems with dirt water in their houses and a man from Sri Lanka who lived in the basement had drowned in his house. Terrible!
This was our garden after the rain. The danger was over and Carlotta thought it looked funny with all that water.

And this was outside the school.