Yep. It happened to me this weekend. Sump pump system failure leads to complete drenching in the carpet of our finished basement. Its a long saga with this particular pump... about a year ago we decided that we should take a preventative change and replace our sump pump and back-up pumps. They were the original model in our house (going on 14 years) and we get a ton of drainage on our corner lot. We used a local plumbing company to put in the new pump and we started have problems right away. The pump worked great, but the float switch was a very poor desgin for our particular sump pit and it kept getting blocked up and it would either fail to go on (starting up the backup) or lock in the on position (so the pump ran continuously). After a month of back and forth with this clogging they finally installed a new float with a mesh screen that prevented the clogging. The downside was that the battery back-up had been used a lot and so we had to get it inspected and the battery had to be cleaned up a bit (corrosion around the leads). That took us through the end of last summer.
Fast forward to this week. I got home from being out of town for 5 days and noticed that my sump pump was running continuously again (Wednesday Night). Because of the mesh screen and the way it was installed, there was no way to for me to "unclog" it. So I called the plumber the next morning (Thursday) to fix it. He cleaned the screen and it worked great. The plumber said if it clogged again to call them and they'd replace it.I left for the rest of the day and got home late that night and again noticed that the pump was running continuously. The problem was I was leaving town again on Friday before the plumbers would get there and no one would be home until my wife got back in town on Saturday night. I found a neighbor that could let the plumber in and replace the float so that it wouldn't be running continuously. So Friday afternoon, the float was replaced and all is well again. Fast forward to Saturday night at 9:30pm when I get a frantic call from my wife that the basement is full of water. The pump(s) had failed somehow. She had water above her foot in a radius around 10ft from the sump pit. All the carpet was soaking wet and would squish up water when you walked on it. When she got to the pump she gave it a shake and it immediately started draining - the freakin' plunger had stuck in the "off" position! Why didn't the battery back-up kick on? Because the plumber had disconnected it and never told anyone. Apparently, he told the neighbor that we'd "probably need a new back-up" and he'd leave us a message on our machine. He didn't tell anyone that it wasn't working and it wasn't hooked up. He also never left a message to this fact. So basically, he left our house unprotected with a back-up pump.
So, here we are today. All the standing water is long gone but the carpets are soaked. We've got a crew drying it out and then we'll assess the damage from there. I don't think I lost anything completely irreplaceable. Luckily, in our unfinished space, we have a series of plastic storage racks that keep everything off the ground about 4". So there were just a few boxes that got damaged. One of them has some of my Star Wars toys in them, so we'll see what's left of those when I get back there. I've gotten out of worrying about carded figures a while ago so I don't think I've lost anything super "valuable".
So anyone else have basement flooding nightmares? I didn't find a thread on this when I searched so I just started one. If I missed that it existed, I'm sure an admin can link it up.