Finally. After almost three long years, the situation caused by The Great Flood of ’00 is over and done with. It seemed like every time I posted to my website about the situation being almost resolved, something else happened and delayed the whole thing, so I stopped all mention of it more than a year ago.
For those of you who haven’t been reading my site for that long, here’s the low-down: In October of 2000, the Price City sewer backed up and flooded our basement, ruining all the carpet, walls, and a lot of our belongings. For the first few days afterwards, various people from Price City told us that their insurance would cover it, and that we should get a contractor to look at the house, give us an estimate, and begin work to restore the basement. Well, we followed their instructions, but after we submitted the formal claim, things got ugly. After months of delay, they denied our claim for damages, after which I nearly killed a city employee. After several more months of trying to figure out what the hell to do, we finally filed a lawsuit against the city. Of course, the lawyers for their insurance company were great at stalling, and they were able to hold out against us until we ran out of money to keep the lawsuit going (after more than a year). We actually settled out of court with them for $2,500, which is a little more than a tenth of what we were suing for.
Very shortly after that, we began the process of filing for bankruptcy, just a few months ago. We filed Chapter 7, which basically means that we don’t have to pay anything back. Our debts–almost $30,000–were finally discharged a few days ago, but we didn’t get the notice of discharge until today. The only debts we discharged were from three credit cards and the contractor who performed the work to our house. In a way, I feel pretty lousy about the whole situation, even though the contractor was a crook himself and tried to cheat the city out of more than $1,000 on our claim for damages. I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad though, since it was all out of my control. The only thing I could have done differently was to get the city’s word in writing before hiring a contractor to fix the damage.
So now, we’ve got some work to do in order to get our credit straightened out and our lives back in order. For being a couple in our early-mid twenties, Traci and I had excellent credit before this happened. We still have one credit card, and I finalized an application for an auto loan through our credit union today. If all goes well, we should soon be in better shape than before all this shit went down.