Dad’s Weekly Report

Dear Family,

Greetings from the disaster zone.  As I wrote earlier, we had a big forest fire here a few weeks ago.  It burned 15,000 acres on the mountain above us and we were evacuated from our house for three days.  There has been a lot of concern here about floods because with the vegetation gone there is nothing to hold the water on the slopes.

Tuesday I left to go to Chicago on a business trip.  About halfway to Chicago I got a call from Sandy telling me that we had a flash flood.  Sandy had gone to the store on a errand and when she got back all the streets were filled with mud and water.  There had been a cloud burst on the hill above us; about 2 inches of water fell in an hour.  The water flowed down the hill and came through our neighborhood.  Quite a bit of it went right through our yard.  Fortunately there is a berm in front of the house that directed the flow around rather than through the house.  We have some neighbors who were not so lucky.  The reports that I read say that 40-80 houses got water in them.  One young girl fell into a ditch and was drowned.  Sandy had some trouble getting to our house.  Here is a picture of the driveway when she got here.

She spent a good part of the day shoveling the mud off of the driveway.  The last few feet of our driveway slopes up before it goes into the garage and the water flowed off the sides before it got into the garage.

Today we went on a walk around our neighborhood.  It appears that one of the biggest flows went through our yard.  Well there were some houses that were hit a lot harder but most not as bad.  Most of the water that came through our yard went around the north side.  Quite a bit of our front yard lawn is scoured.  I doubt that it will recover very well.

Some of the water flowed around the south side and flowed between the house and our outbuilding.

We had already put out some wattles which are long net bags of straw that are designed to slow the flow of water.  After the flood Sandy went and got sandbags that she stacked in front of the garage.  Yesterday a family in our ward came by with their pickup truck and brought us 2 loads of sand bags.  We stacked them in the yard in rows to direct water from the next flood away from the house.  Here is picture of the north side where the main flow went.

You can see our stacks of sandbags and wattles.  There used to be some grass where you see the flow of mud.

And here is a picture of the south side.

We also put a line of sandbags in the driveway to direct the flow off the driveway.  There is a real danger that we will get another flood.  Hopefully it won’t be any worse.  The monsoon season should be over in about a month. Some of our neighbors have brought backhoes in to dig big trenches around their houses.  I still need to try to clean out the dirt that fills the culvert under our driveway.

Well that is all the exciting news.  First a blizzard then a fire then a flood.  We are expecting an earthquake and a volcano next.  It is pretty exciting here.

Love,

John