WINTHROP, Mas. — Several inches of rain disrupted weekend plans in Winthrop overnight, but the heaviest band hit early in the morning.
Some neighbors spent the night pumping water from their basements.
Waking up to waterlogged streets was only half of it. For neighbors facing the marsh, the flood waters seeped in fast after the heavy rainfall.
"The funny thing was there was so much water against the house and I thought 'the basement, uh oh', and I went down there and it was dry, I couldn't believe it," said Terry O'Connell. "I went and had some coffee, fed the cat, brushed my teeth and had a piece of toast, went down to the basement again and there was water that deep down there, and it happened really fast," O'Connell said.
Terry O'Connell just put in a new furnace two weeks ago. He, like his neighbors, are now pumping out more than a foot of water from the basement. There is no word yet on whether anything can be salvaged.
"There's nothing I could do. I have power down there, I'm not going wandering around down there," O'Connell said.
His neighbor Debby got more like two and a half feet of water, and just a few streets down, tennis courts looked more like a pond.
At Ingleside Park, people who tried to pass through learned the hard way - that it was deeper than it looked.
From East Boston to Revere, wet conditions made for many detours on morning errands.
People who live in Winthrop were taken completely by surprise. They say there hasn't been a flood this bad in about 10 years.
Residents say that although the mortgage companies require them to buy flood insurance, this is not their first rodeo, and with the kind of flooding they've seen today, they say they have not been covered in the past by insurance.