Woman Swims in Storm Waters After Severe Flooding Turns Basement into ‘Indoor Pool’ (Exclusive)

Hearing noises at 2 a.m. is usually a bad sign — especially during a storm.

Jessica Loos was having trouble sleeping when she heard something crash in her basement. By the time she got down there, there were already 2 inches of water covering the floor, knocking things over.

“I ran to get my husband out of bed, and we immediately started moving everything that we could out of the basement,” Loos, 26, tells PEOPLE. “The water was coming in so fast that it got up to 14 inches in no time. Water was pooling outside our house, and there’s nowhere for it to drain, and so it drains directly in through our foundation.” 

Over the next few hours, Loos and her husband ran up and down the stairs carrying as much as they could, starting with their most valuable items. All the baby clothes they had been storing for their almost-2-year-old son were drenched, but they tried to salvage as much as they could.

The water seeped into nearly everything, including their front-loading dryer. As the sun came up, Loos called her parents, who live nearby, and they helped clear more things out of the soaked basement. 

Soon, they hit a point where there was nothing else they could do. With her husband and father upstairs, Loos decided to “make lemonade out of lemons.” With a recent mermaid TikTok trend in mind, Loos took out her phone, hit record and hopped in.

“I got in the water, and it was freezing cold, and I set my phone up on the bottom of our basement, and I just went for it, and I posted it,” Loos shares. The video got 3.5 million views.

She also made a video “paddling” through the “indoor pool” on an inflatable pool and another asking her friends to join her.

People in the comments were quick to make assumptions about the safety of her videos, such as whether the water was clean, questioning if she could get electrocuted, or infested by a “brain-eating amoeba.”

However, Loos shares that her house was built within the last five years and there’s no connection from her basement to the sewer. 

“In the video, from the angle, you had the brown ceiling reflecting on the water, which gives it more of a brown tone,” she shares. “I did not end up sick. I did not get a brain-eating amoeba, like many of the comments said, and I was just trying to have fun.”

“There was no electricity that was gonna be a concern,” she adds. “It was just a huge concrete pool. All the wiring is in the ceiling. There was no concern of being electrocuted. I appreciate the people who were genuinely concerned.”

Thankfully, the water was cleared out of the house by 9 a.m. that same day. Since posting the initial video, Loos has been communicating with plumbers to assess the damage and filed a claim with her insurance. 

Loos lives in Camp Point, Ill., an area that rarely experiences floods, which means the damage likely won’t be covered by her insurance, she says.

“Our agent said, ‘Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do. There’s nothing under your policy to cover that,’ which was heartbreaking, because there was a lot of ruin, and there’s nothing that they can do,” she says. “All of this will have to be paid for out of pocket.”

In terms of loss, there were a few things that couldn’t be salvaged, including Loos’ high school diploma and salutatorian certificate. Loos and her family have been doing laundry at her parents’ house, and are slowly cleaning up the mess and rebuilding from water damage. 

Loos has since set up a Ring camera in her basement to watch for any more flooding. She says “the next few weeks will be to make sure that we keep the basement clean.”

“We have not seen any mold or had any issues. In the past, we’ve kept a dehumidifier running, and we’ve had our basement cleaned, making sure that if we ever do get rain, we stay on top of our basement.” 

In the meantime, Loos’ basement “pool” is closed for the season, hopefully never to reopen again.