Wacky Winter...Flood!

This winter has been so strange.  Like yesterday when we headed out after church for a bike ride to the sewer lagoons in 50+ degree weather--in February!  (And it snowed about a foot, a total blizzard, on Saturday at Beaver with spring in the valley.)  Funny side note--while we were riding Jer said something about "human feces."  Ian asked, "what kind of species live here?"  That's feces, Ian!  It was a beautiful, relaxing day spent with the ones I love most.  Watching them all bike in a line down the road in front of me, in this beautiful place we live, I felt truly blessed.  I digress though...

Back in February it did become winter around here for a short time.  In a period of three days we got almost two feet of snow at our house.  We were hammered!  It was awesome and everything looked so beautiful and white.

A few old winter pics from Christmas Eve...kayaking behind the four-wheeler!

February's big snow storm.  I think Seth was rethinking his decision not to wear snow pants to the bus stop.

After the big snow storm it immediately warmed up and started raining non-stop.  In about a 24-hour period of warm temperatures and steady rain all of the snow melted.  Well, we live across the road from hundreds of acres of farmland.  On Saturday Feb. 8th water started coming across the road like crazy.  (We found out last summer that there is a problem with the ditch that is supposed to catch it.  It has been filled in by some neighbors down the road so the water has nowhere to go.  We knew we needed to address the problem with them in the spring and before flood irrigating time but weren't anticipating problems in the winter.)  Anyhoo, during the night water came in force and pooled up at the end of the driveway.  That's the only place it can go through the gravel and get under the house--which it did.  The sump pump kicked on but the discharge was only a foot or so from the house.  Jer and I were working on church stuff about 7 am when Luke came running up saying his bathroom was covered in water.  Sure enough water had filled the window wells and was pouring in the windows in the bathroom and the guest bedroom.  Luke and I started vacuuming and wiping up while Jer ran outside, jumped in the crotch deep icy water, and bailed it out.  So fun.

The day just go better as we removed the furniture, carpet, etc...from the guest room and then headed out to fight the flood.  We were blessed by friends and neighbors out here who came with heavy equipment and shovels to help us out.  We spent most of the day digging and training the water to go in between us and our neighbors and off the drop off at the back of our property.  It was a raging river rushing through...the pictures don't even begin to do it justice.  The ground was too frozen for the backhoe to really dig in or for us to begin to address the root cause, which is the ditch, but we put some band aids on the problem.  We made two temporary "speed bumps" in our long driveway to direct water, and I spent quite a bit of time over the next few days using a pump to move water.  The sump pump discharge has been fixed, so I don't think our basement will flood like that again, but we do have a bigger problem to address come spring.  It was the perfect storm.  Quite the exciting day.