Flood relief off grid solar

Howdy y'all.

I have an interesting problem and some experience with off grid solar and I'm looking for advice before I make a decision.

Here's the deal:
I live in Lyons, Colorado, which just got hammered by floods. My place is generally fine, but we've all been evacuated and there is no power, no gas, no water, no sewer. They are saying it will be 2 to 6 months before folks are allowed to move back in. It's unclear when they'll have gas and power back on -- they are saying they don't want gas and power back until they can provide fire protection (seems like a few weeks out, but unclear at this time). It's also possible that the power connections to this particular spot are trashed (the river ate an electrical box adjacent to the property).

I'm trying to help some friends with their basement, which was badly flooded and now sits pretty close to where the new river runs. It has sump pumps which quit when the power went out. I want to power them up again to help the basement stay dry and avoid mold growth (it's been wet for a week now). I think we can power one at a time and they draw 400 watts. I'm concerned the thing is going to run continuously, 24/7. The sump isn't very big and my recollection is it runs all the time (possibly a crummy design, or maybe the float switch should be higher or something). So that's 9600 watt-hours/day (pretty damned big load, really). There's actually a large natural gas backup generator on site... which doesn't work because they actually turned the gas off before the electricity... They are letting us in to do work intermittently.

Question 1: What could I do, or should I do, to cut the load down? Buy a smaller pump? Use just the "back-up" pump, which I believe has a higher float switch position? Just put it on a cheap timer and use that to chop the load (i.e. on for 30 minutes, off for 30 minutes?)

Question 2: Could I rent a solar powered system for a few weeks or a month until we get power or gas? Any recommendations?

Question 3 is: What would it really take to cobble together a system? They might have a solar-powered golf cart sitting there. I scoped it out earlier, before the evacuation and I believe it has 6 T-105 batteries and a 120 watt solar panel. It's set up as a 36V system, but I'm assuming I could ditch the panel and just use the batteries configured as a 12V system.

I'm wondering if I could cobble together a hybrid generator and solar system with a significant battery bank. Assuming we could get in there every day, we could run a generator for an hour or two in the morning and then maybe again later in the day. In theory we could also add solar to this system. If the batteries are good for 4000 watt-hours of storage and I could cut my load down by putting the pump on a timer of some sort, I think we could make this work. If I cut it down to 6 hours of runtime between generator runs, then the battery bank should be able to handle it pretty well. I think we could get a pretty cheap generator new and then keep it for the next time they lose both gas and electricity.

Question 4: What's out there for a good, inexpensive 12 V inverter/charger that would mate well with a 12 V, 675 Ah nominal battery bank?

Of course folks are concerned about money, given that they are all out of their houses, etc., so cheaper is definitely better. I'll be doing my homework, but nothing obvious has jumped out yet. Thanks a bunch for any ideas you might have.