The Big Flood & June Arrives.

At least it is less than a month since I last posted. For the past 8+ years I have written my blog posts while I was at our Real Estate office.  It was easy to sit at the computer and organize my thoughts and edit photos between phone calls.  When we had a lot going on on the farm (as in breeding, raising and taking care of 50+ alpacas and all that that required) I liked to post on a weekly basis, because something was always happening.  As we reduced our herd of alpacas I found there was less of interest (at least for me to write about) on a weekly basis and reduced my posts to about every other week.  I would like to keep to that schedule, but now that I am no longer captive at the office a couple of days a week I am finding it difficult to sit at the computer for the amount of time required to do a decent job.  I think the fact that it is summer also makes it more difficult to commit to the time because there is so much outdoor work to do.  As I write this, I can almost hear the weeds growing in the garden!
 
So much has happened since my last post.  It got kind of crazy around here for a while.  Really crazy, which had nothing to do with the fact that Sam left on a Friday to go to fishing in Canada with three other guys.  He has done this before and I felt I could handle things pretty well since we no longer have the office to man or any baby alpacas due.  All I had to do was take care of things at home, which was going to require a lot of mowing, planting the garden and weeding, going to agility class on Tuesday night and spending time on my own projects, such as plying some nice alpaca silk yarn, which is what I was doing in the photo above on Sunday afternoon after a nice long walk.  Little did I know that in just over 48 hours, the view from this deck would change quite a bit.

On Tuesday, I left in the evening for the 1 hour drive to Parkersburg for agility class which goes from 7 to about 8:20 pm.  It was a nice evening and there were possible thunderstorms in the forecast, which is a common evening occurrence at this time of year in Ohio.  When I headed home from class around 8:30 it was still light but it looked dark off to the north which was the direction I was going.  As I got closer to home, it got darker and darker and there was a lot of lightning going on.  About 2/3 of the way home, it started to rain and it rained like I have rarely experienced, and it was truly frightening.  The water started covering the roads and I was very happy indeed to be driving a big Ram 4 X 4.  I just wanted to get home.  I drove through a couple of sketchy places without issue, but when I got to the beaver pond, less than a mile from home, I stopped and contemplated whether I should continue on or turn around and take the high road, which would add 5 miles to my drive.  It was dark.  It was raining, and the water was rushing across the road and it looked deep.  It didn't take long for common sense to prevail, and I backed up to a place I could turn around and went the long, safe way home.

What I found when I got home was incredible.  I drove past the house to see how high the water had gotten and saw it was up running through the poly-shelter where we keep our tractors and trailers and various other machinery and equipment.  This had only happened once before when we were hit with the tail of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. That time we got about 5" of rain in one day.  And all this had just occurred in less than 2 hours!  I parked the truck and went on foot out to see how high the water had gotten.  It was 10 pm and quite dark and the rain had let up, but it was still coming down pretty hard.  This was what I saw as I looked across the creek toward the chicken coop.  The water had already receded somewhat, but the chicken coop looked wrong.  It had actually been picked up and turned 180 degrees!  Both our bridges were gone, so there was no way to go over and look more closely.  As I passed  my newly planted (now flooded garden), I heard a sharp hissing noise above the sound of rushing water and I feared a gas line break, so I returned to the house for a flashlight and went to inspect further.  Where the line from the gas wells goes into the pressure tank before going to the house there was indeed a leak, caused by a valve breaking open when the pressure take was moved off the blocks it sat on by the force of the water.   This really worried me because Sam was away and I have no idea how to repair a major break in a gas line.  And it was after 10 pm at night.  So I formed a plan for morning, had a nice glass of whiskey and went to bed.

By morning, the waters had receded greatly, as they usually do.  The water runs downhill, for the most part, to the Ohio River about 30 miles away and it does go down as quickly as it comes up.  But we had had so many of these drenching downpours this spring that the ground was saturated and, according to the local weatherman, we had gotten over 2.6" of rain in under 2 hours.  The water had come up under our deck on the house and washed all kinds of debris out from under it.  It had run through my gardens.  It had washed away both bridges.  It had picked up our hay rake and put it in a tree in the creek (the hitch end is circled in blue in the photo, the rest is  buried in debris or underwater).  It had run through the barn where Apples the pony and our last 2 alpacas and Star the guard dog live.  Thankfully our power never went out.  However, I had to get the gas back on.  I called the local gas and oil baron who has several gas/oil wells leased on our property, though not the one in question.  He was kind enough to send the  guys who do his well maintenance out to my place and they had things fixed up in no time.  They were able to find everything they needed in Sam's supply of fittings and they used our tractor to lift the pressure tank back up onto its blocks.  It was very nice of him to help me out, especially since Sam was not due back for 4 more days and I didn't relish having no hot water for that long.

In this photo, you can see the footbridge in 2 pieces on the far bank of the creek, one right next to the creek and the other above the pile of debris a little further down.

Another shot of where the larger bridge used to be.  One metal I-beam is still underwater and the other is exposed.  In the left bottom corner is where one end of the bridge used to be.  Part of the footbridge is up on the far bank.

The same view from the other side of the creek a little later in the day.  The water has receded a lot.

Later the in the day the day after the storm, I got the tractor out and hitched up the portion of the footbridge that was parallel to the creek and dragged one end across so that I would be able to cross the creek without wading. This is something I need to do at least twice a day since we have animals on that side of the creek.

The chickens were a bit confused about how to get back into their coop, since their entry door was now on the opposite side of the building.  Their enclosure was no longer enclosing their yard.  I keep visualizing the wild ride they must have had when the water picked that coop up and swung it around.  I think the only thing that stopped it from going further was the buried electric line that goes into it.

Once Sam got home Sunday, we got busy .  There is still clean up to do and bridges need to be rebuilt.   But the hay rake is out of the tree and appears to be repairable and the chicken coop has been returned to its proper place and the fence fixed.  There was a lot of damage to a fence in a pasture across the road from our other house as well and Sam has repaired that already.  Hopefully it will be at least another 14 years before we experience this much flooding again.

In other news, Grover and I attended a 3 day agility trial near Youngstown, Ohio this past weekend, where we earned our QQ # 20!!!!!  We also got another QQ and a Jumpers Q and earned 50 MACH points.  We now need 119 points to earn our MACH title.  It is within reach.  I am SO excited!

Our next trial will be at the same venue, but not until the middle of July.  This weekend Sam and I are heading to Oregon to meet our new grandson and to attend the graduation of our son, Ian, from Oregon State University, with a bachelors degree from the College of Forestry in Recreation Resource Management and a minor in Geographic Information Science.  We are so incredibly proud of his accomplishments and are very much looking forward to our trip  We will be joined for a short time by our other son, Sam/Zac/Satchmo and also my mother.