Monday, April 16, 2007

G-d Willing and the Creek Don't...Uh Oh!

Well, we had 8 inches of heavy, wet snow yesterday, and today we've had another 5 inches of rain. There's a creek not 25 yards from our house, but the banks are high and there's no record of it flooding ever in the last 130 years. Even last year, when far larger bodies of water flooded, the creek stayed nicely below its banks.

Well, I don't have a tv, but creek watching is at least as exciting as any reality tv show. This morning, it breached its banks in my low pasture in the back - the house is a good ways up from it, but the pasture is now what I'm affectionately calling "Lake Woods." And we're about 6 inches from the banks up by the house. I'm wondering if I'll be evacuating later.

The husband and kids are still in NYC - I'm hoping I won't have to leave tonight and join neighbors on higher ground, but am glad that if I do, the only little things I'll have to round up are furry. And the furnace isn't working - the basement is flooded and the sump pump isn't working. We've got wood, but I'm not looking forward to that repair bill.

I miss my kids. I miss my husband, not only because I love him, but because I'd really like to have someone to split the joy of wading through the water to try and get the sump working with. I'm not having a good day.

And here I thought climate change was going to be fun... ;-P!

Cheers, and I hope you are all dry,

Sharon

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Owie wowie. My heart goes out to you!

Wear a lifejacket?

Michelle In TN said...

Basement flooded? That sucks.
Sorry for your struggles. M

Anonymous said...

Hi Sharon,
I checked in with your blog this morning and reminded myself to link to your post on the Mommy Wars, Which I LOVED by the way and then when I came back to link I saw this post! ouch, I'm sending good thoughts that your water stops rising!

Love,
Heather

Anonymous said...

I have this rule of thumb thing about looking at a property at sunrise (or sunset) to see when the sun appears (or if there are trees, to see when the sunlight starts filtering through them). For example, if the sun is supposed to rise at 7:00 AM and the sun cannot be seen or light can’t be seen filtering through the trees until, say, 7:24, the land may lie too low.

It takes X number of minutes for the sun to rise Y degrees in the sky. So the length of time it takes for the light to hit your land at sunrise may correlate with how far down in a depression you are. If you are living in a depression, your horizon is elevated. You can figure out using a protractor how high your horizon is elevated. Or you can use a clinometer.

Or you can sort of use the time of sunrise. Depending on the time of year, it takes a given number of minutes for the sun to rise one degree in the sky. At this time of year, it takes about four minutes for the sun to rise one degree. So if sunrise is at 7:00 and you’re standing on a piece of land at but you don’t see the sun until 7:04, your horizon is elevated one degree and your land is depressed one degree. I live in Texas, which is basically a plain. I don’t worry about a location if I can see the sun within five minutes of sunrise, but anything less than that and I start getting worried.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I should have said "anything more than that" and I get worried.

jewishfarmer said...

LOL, You don't need any sophisticated techniques to figure out if we're in a depression. You look to the right, and see the big hill. You look to the left, and see the big hill. Fortunately, much of our land is up on one of the hills, so it lays just fine, and while some of it lays wet, most is ok. As for the creek, well the house has been here for 130 years, and there was another house on the foundation 220 years ago that got demolished, not washed away.

The good thing is we're *never* short of water, we don't have to irrigate, and we can live on our rainfall if necessary. Mostly its a blessing. Except when it isn't ;-).

Sharon (who is just fine, btw - the creek crested its banks a bit, but subsided when the rain did last night).

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