Friday, April 19, 2013

Hows my little flood?

It's been a particularly wet spring here in E.C. IL. As winter ended we got several big rains which for a couple of weeks didn't seem to do anything, then suddenly ponds and lakes began to fill up as the ground finished swelling with much needed moisture after our intense drought last summer.

As they say, when it rains it pours.

Last week it rained for four days in a row, we got a short break of glorious sun and warmth and this week its now rained for another four days in a row. Yesterday it rained hard for easily 14 hours straight and was a nice way to cap a week of gloom.

Just two blocks from us, there is a 5' ditch with a culvert under the road here. Those brown piles are corn stalks from the nearby field.

The park I fly my kite at two blocks away.

You can typically walk another 20-30 feet down this path.

A log jam on a river that's over doubled in width.

A canoe can go under this bridge usually.

This was already a civil engineering marvel, for some reason someone thought it was a good idea to run the overflow water over this road always. So usually there is about a 2 inch deep 4 foot wide channel of water running from right to left here. There is a 3-4 foot drop on the left side of the road. When we run here we have to balance on the submerged curb on the left to get past with dry feet. Laura and I stood on the curbs here for quite a while watching the HUGE carp swim around in the road area while swimming back and fourth over the curbs. After while we noticed that the water was actually beginning to backflow into the lake. A stranger later told us it was the river overflowing into the lake. 

This is our usually awesome draining back yard. Thats our garlic on the near right side of the garden that we hope survives all this rain.


At least its not snow I guess.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Maybe you could take advantage of the situation and dig a pond? Perhaps stock it with some of that carp and you could fish all summer off your back porch!

Lemons to lemonade? Maybe?