Ramblings-n-Writings

Posts Tagged ‘flooding’

Why is it that whenever I sit down, dream up a bunch of writing projects, plan a blogging schedule, and am content with how things are finally fitting together someone throws a wrench in the wheel???

I was feeling so good about everything last week. Even my body was cooperating – for those that don’t know, I’m cursed blessed with a crazy ride on the hypothyroidism bandwagon.

And then Friday happened. I woke up to a loud crack of thunder just as the skies opened up and the rains came down.

We have a small mountain stream coming out of the hills behind our house. The stream feeds into 18 inch culvert pipe that runs under our yard and out on the other side of the driveway.

After an average rain, the stream looks like this …

That photo was from last November. Notice the high bank, about 4-1/2 to 5 ft, on the left side.

When I first looked outside Friday morning, the stream was barely running. In fact, it looked sorta like this …

That’s actually from 5 days before, but you get the idea. It didn’t even look like that first picture.

About 15-20 minutes after the skies opened up Friday morning, the stream looked like this …

Um, yeah… Quite shocking. Water was roaring out of the hills. And, honestly, I haven’t seen that much water in our stream in the 5 years we’ve lived on this property.

I immediately realized something was blocking the entrance to the culvert pipe. I called for help, ran to get a shovel, and proceeded to almost lose the shovel in the pipe. The suction was so strong against the pipe that there was no way to pry what we later discovered was a log away from the pipe entrance.

Because the log was blocking the bottom portion of the pipe, the dirt and small rocks washing down the stream started to pile up. Before it was all over, we had a 4 foot high island in the middle of the stream and a sandbar in the backyard.

Remember the photo with the daisies? Here’s Spot standing on the island.

Notice he’s almost level with the top of the bank? He’s standing where the bottom pool of water is in the daisy picture. Crazy, huh?

So, that mess is what consumed most of our Friday morning and afternoon. Then, just when things were getting back to normal, our electricity went off. *sigh*

Not only were all my ideas for Friday totally messed up, but it rolled over into Saturday too. No computer work. Almost no housework done. Seems like I did a little bit of nothing since it was incredibly hot Friday night with the humidity level at 90%. If you blinked your eyes too many times, you broke into an immediate sweat. Yuck!

What have I learned these past weeks after periodically losing our DSL, the flooding, and no electricity? Flexibility!!! And not to sweat the small stuff. What day I post a blog post is no big deal even though it stresses me out when I can’t do it like I plan. It’s all about flexibility.

And even with all the ugliness of the water, there’s still beautiful things, such as these …

Yesterday, I showed you the flood waters on our farm.

Here are a few more as well as some from the area.

The creek in front of the barn. The ducks moved to higher ground for the day.

Looking to the left up the creek in front of the barn. The foot bridge was under water. The water is normally 2+ feet below the base of the bridge.

We took a drive in the big red truck. This is the mouth of another gravel road about a mile from our house. Notice the road sign. It warns that there is a “low water crossing bridge” and not cross when flooded. Hmmm… definitely ain’t crossing it! We guessed that the water was about 9-10 feet deep instead of its usual 6-8 inches.

To give you an idea of the average creek size (when it isn’t flooding), look at the left side of the photo. See that straight piece of water? That’s the normal creek width when contained in its banks. At the narrowest point, the creek is about 5 feet, widest is 10 feet, give or take a few feet. Remember that when looking at these next photos…

When we first left in the big red truck, we turned left at the end of our gravel road. A little over a mile down the road, we encountered this. In the distance is a house on the right and a mailbox on the left. The water was almost to the bottom of the mailbox. Good thing the mail lady didn’t come!

The creek expanded from hillside to hillside. On a regular day, this is green field with a narrow creek (like the one I pointed out earlier) winding through the field.

Again, think green field, narrow creek. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

See that line in the middle of the water? That’s the horse ring where the local riding club has its shows. About once a year, this area floods but nothing like yesterday! That line is the top rail of an approx 4-1/2 ft high fence. The actual creek is not in the photo either so the water was much deeper in other areas.

Close up of the horse ring.

So, I’ve seen enough water for a long time. Unfortunately, it’s raining this afternoon. Are we getting round two?

On an average day, this is what it looks like out our front door. (This photo is from last summer.)

This is what it looked like at 7:15 a.m. today. Flash floods hit our area again, but this year’s is by far the worst we’ve seen. When all is normal, a large culvert pipe runs under our road and comes out under the forsythia bush. Two mountain streams and ditch line typically feed into the culvert pipe. In the previous picture, the red truck is just on the other side of the culvert. The culvert couldn’t handle today’s rains.

Looking left up the road.

Looking right down the road.

Looking across the road at more streams on the farm.

Water coming around the forsythia bush. Normally it should only be coming out from underneath it.

Mandy wasn’t too thrilled about getting wet feet walking across the road.

But after the water went down, she realized that flood waters leave all sorts of fun things behind.

Not so pretty, but this about two feet worth of river rock and silt left behind.

See that bit of grass sticking out to the left of the ditch line? That’s the normal ground level, pre silt and river rock.

Stay tuned for photos of our adventure down the road (The Great Flood of 2009, part 2). I’ll probably put them up tomorrow because I’m beat – my in-laws basement flooded and we spent hours dealing with that water.