The deluge of rain on June 30-July 1 totaled 3.5 inches at our place between Brookville and Sigel in Jefferson County.

It wasn’t just the amount that had us saying, “Wow!” The thing was a deluge. We got two full inches of that rain within a half-hour.

I saw rain like that earlier this year — in Florida, where one expects tropical downpours. But until this year, I had not expected to see that intensity of rain here in west-central Pennsylvania.

I have a two-foot-high rain gauge on a post outside our back door. That location makes it readable from within the house, which keeps our observations dry when gully-washers strike.

I have another rain-measuring thing: The gravel on the slope that takes our driveway down about 10 feet to the pad outside our attached garage.

As the July 1 storm sputtered into last-gasp showers, I spent a half-hour with a rake and a shovel, respreading washed-out gravel to re-cover the troughs that heavy rains gouge along that slope.

If there is one gouge, we got smacked. If there are two gouges, as there were last week, we got inundated.

But this is the first house that I have owned that does not fill up with water in its cellar. We have a cellar, not a basement. It has a clay-based dirt-floor beneath the center section of our old farmhouse that was probably built way back before the Civil War.

The cellar’s walls are huge chunks of barn stone, topped with smaller stones near the surface. Those walls are porous enough to admit mice in autumn, but in 16 years, we have never had water on its floor except when a hot water tank dies. Our mineralized well water ensures that will happen every four years or so.

I don’t know what those long-ago builders did to give us such a perpetually dry cellar, because I am not fool enough to dig down and see: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I suspect some sort of French drain arrangement, superbly designed.

On either side of our house, which rests about 20 feet below a hilltop, underground springs flow. Those springs replenish water in our 25-foot-deep hand-dug well and our 1,000-gallon cistern. They also keep our half-acre pond nearly full. Its 14-foot depth has not shrunk by more than two feet despite numerous summer dry spells. That speaks to the adequacy of our water supply — and increases my admiration for the people who laid our farmhouse’s foundation so that the water from those springs flows around our house, not through it.

My childhood home was on a hillside. It was built with water in mind, too, but its walls did not keep water out. Rather, they used weep holes and floor troughs to channel water from summer storms and winter snowmelt in through the uphill wall and out through the downhill wall — if we kept the grit, mud and gravel cleaned out.

The first house I bought had a three-foot-wide clay sewer tile embedded on end into the concrete floor. “Gee,” I wondered, “what is that for?”

D’oh. Sump pump.

That house was on the low side of the Allegheny River in Warren. Until the Kinzua Dam was built seven miles upstream, floods were perennial problems in Warren. Sump pumps were new gizmos in my young adult experience. The pump’s piping lifted the water to gush outside. That house’s basement got wet on occasion but when we lived there, it never drew more than a foot of water.

I can’t say that about the house we bought on Pentz Run Avenue in Sandy Township just south of DuBois. “Pentz Run Avenue” is so named because the Pentz Run creek runs 100 feet behind that house — and, on occasion, through it.

In 1956, January snowmelt pushed water to within two basement steps of our first floor, and then mercifully stopped. In July, a deluge pushed water to within just one basement step of our kitchen. Sections of the DuBois area were flooded, and Brookville and New Bethlehem suffered major damage that year.

What about those two sump pumps in our basement?

We pulled them. Long-resident neighbors educated us. When the floodwaters atop our yard rose high enough to lap against three sides of our foundation, either we let the water into our basement to equalize the water pressure, or we would watch part or all of our foundation walls crumble.

Water goes where water goes in those situations. People and foundations adapt, or not.

Happily, our current house, for all its chinks, planks and squeaky floors, does not flood.

But our neighborhood sure did get soaked last week.

Gravel can be re-raked or replaced. That sure beats cleaning mud-clogged basements or trying to salvage flood-soaked possessions.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor/publisher at newspapers in DuBois, Brookville, New Bethlehem and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: notniceman9@gmail.com.