Sorry to see this and I moved out of a flood zone 15 years ago, so my pins are safe from rivers now.

But you can get a hell of a lot of damage from a plugged running toilet, or busted pipe, depending on where the games are located. Seems the best place for a lineup is ALWAYS underneath a bathroom.

The plugged running toilet dual point failure happened to me recently.

We were fixing to go kayaking and would have been gone about 6 hours. I was downstairs letting the dogs out, admiring the games when the first drop fell on TZ's glass. It went to hell real quick from there.

Somebody had flushed the toilet upstairs and it completely filled the bathroom floor, and then came down all over the place in the basement arcade. I managed to pull some games out from under the waterfall and had materials handy to cover the ones I couldn't move. It's good to be in the process of insulating your basement walls with 4x8 sheets of extruded foam. They make excellent watersheds in a pinch. In the end, miraculously I suffered no damages.

Had I been the one to flush that toilet and we had been out the door, I would have no games today, not a one.

So if anybody has any ideas on how to prevent death from above, I'm all ears.

I got incredibly lucky. Nothing got damaged, but only because I was standing right there when it started. I only had four pins at the time. I was able to pull two pins out of the area, the other two pins and vids I covered with 4x8 sheets of pink foam that just happened to be right there. Water came down from the joists all around the bathroom perimeter for 20 minutes like rain.

We have since moved to a bigger house, and now we have seven pins in a finished basement and the of course the best way to arrange them is under the bathroom again. So I have games kinda scattered all around in a maze like fashion to avoid water sources from above. I would prefer to put "something" under the joists to make a dry zone over the arcade.

Seems most people have pins in the basement. Many are perhaps unaware of this particular risk.

In a related incident, I once had the garbage disposal in the kitchen blow a seal and rained rotten lettuce water all over the couch in the basement below. Friend of mine lost some electronic stuff in his basement from a hose coming off the clothes washer in the upstairs laundry room.

Lots of home appliances would love to kill pins.