Before I continue on with my regular blogging topics, for posterities sake I wanted to post something about the flood we just had.
Flooding started in the early morning hours of the 12th, our neighborhood was evacuated around noon of that same day. I stayed with family a few towns away. Evacuation orders were lifted the 14th, and then reset the 15th. The morning of the 16th evacuation orders were lifted again –I made my way home that day with no problems.
My whole town was really pounded by this flood, and the creek that runs through our neighborhood took on a significant amount of water and flooded some of the homes closest to it. But, in general, my neighborhood faired pretty well. All thanks to a flood mitigation project that was completed last year! That mitigation project was a huge annoyance that impacted everyones daily routines for nearly a year. There was all sorts of grumbling over how silly it was for the city to go to all that work for such a tiny little creek.
Prior to this mitigation project our home sat JUST outside of the 100 year flood plain. Some speculate that this flood was a 500 year event. So, I can tell you now that I am loving me some city planners and engineers right now, and take back every grumbling word I said over that year of construction.
I love perspective videos and pictures, so, I thought I’d share some with you –they are best viewed in full screen.
This was 9:30 A.M. on Thurs. the 12th, three hours before I was evacuated –take note of the far bank.
Friday the 13th A.M. The beginning of this video is in the same area I took my videos.
Monday the 16th, 4:00 P.M. –same intersection as the first video.
Here is a picture of early spring run-off. As you can see, even when it is running strong it is not a very large creek.
This is taken three days after the aerial video.
Life after the flood? I was among those least impacted, so I don’t know how fair my perspective is. There is still a lot to be concerned about with the folks who live further up in the mountain towns. They most certainly took some hard damage. I can tell you that people here though are mostly in good spirits wherever I go. We are all in some state of gratitude and/or amazement at getting to see and live through such an unusual event (And yes, seeing that much water here is a very unusual event!). There is almost always the sound of helicopters in the sky. And we seem to have a lot of tourists coming out to see what they can see.
There are projects that will be tough to clean and fix, but mostly our little town is picking itself up so quickly that it’s already getting hard to detect the signs of flooding.
Everyone seems to be getting up and getting on with life –just happy to be alive.
I don’t know, maybe it is one of my regular blogging topic after all.
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