I was in complete disarray last week when we were notified by our local weatherman that we were going to have severe storms. I thought that the storm was going to be just like every storm that we would get in the midwest. A mild one with a few inches of rain, an occasional tornado warning and large amounts of lighting and thunder. But not this one. I should have prepared my home much more. I didn’t nail wood to the windows and doors, I didn’t close my storm shutters. I should have put sandbags all around my home. I didn’t think I needed to install sandbags since my home hasn’t flooded in over 15 years when we had a major storm. But I was wrong. When I went downstairs into my basement, there was water about 3 feet deep. The furniture was floating, my floor and walls were ruined and the worst part of it all was that the boiler that was installed just two years ago was submerged in water. Having a boiler in water is a dangerous thing. It’s extremely important not to attempt to operate the boiler until it has been replaced. Operating a boiler in wet conditions can cause it to catch fire and lead to serious injury like electric shock and potential death. Once I saw my boiler in the condition that it was in, I immediately contacted the local heating and cooling technician. Due to the amount of service calls that the HVAC company was experiencing they were not able to get to my home until two days later. For two days we didn’t have any heat but we did not want to risk touching the boiler whatsoever.