This is your drain, and this is your drain on drugs

The way my house is set up the drive way is long and sloping down into the garage. Now this is great when the winter storms hit and I need a good excuse to get out of work, because during those, there is no way I'm driving out of there.

But turns out it’s not very good for torrential rain.

Right in front of the garage and at the bottom of the hill there is a drain that runs out to a ditch, which is supposed to keep water from coming into the garage. It works great...when it is clean and free of debris.

This I did not know.

Around June there was a crazy storm that blew through the city, I was up watching TV and my roommate had gone to sleep, but woke up to all the thunder. When he walked in we went down through the garage to look, and it was not good. The water was about to the door and ready to start coming in the basement.

We take off as quick as we can and I run to the shed to grab a broom and he runs in the house to get shoes and flashlights for us, and for the next 2 hours in the middle of the night, there we were shoveling water out of the garage like a couple jackasses.

Not wanting to experience that again, we were on a mission a couple weeks later to clear out that drain.

If you find yourself in this situation and want to follow what I did, what you'll need is a high pressure nozzle for your water hose, some zip ties and something long and sturdy but flexible. I had a spool of box banding cable with some sort of end piece riveted on the end, like this. 

What you do is take your hose and zip tie it to the end of the banding cable, giving it enough rigidity to go through the drain without getting caught on anything.

Once you have that, turn on the water and jam that bad boy down in there. What will mostly likely happen is if there is something blocking it up, nasty water will shoot back into your face, so beware. But after a while of running water and the hose down that hole, it will start to clear up.

You may have to get extra lengths of hose depending on how long the drain is, how far down the blockage is and how far away your spigot is from the drain.

I had the benefit of knowing where the drain ran off to, which is not always the case with these types of drains. If you do, look out the end and see when water starts running out clear, and if not, just use your best judgement. If you can pull the hose in and out with ease you should be clear of most blockages.

Several weeks after that we had another rain storm, so as I was getting myself mentally prepared to shovel some more water, I went out to the garage and sure enough that drain was slurping down water like a champ.