Flood Journal

Posted on June 15, 2004    Posted by John Scalzi

See this little lake? Well, actually, it’s supposed to be the road, two fields, and my and my neighbors’ lawns. We had a really massive thunderstorm today and as a result all the water has flooded into the road and is attempting to push its way into the tiny little creek just south of my house (in fact, it’s supposed to be behind that line of trees you see). The water rose very quickly — in the space of about a half hour — and this is what I expect (which is to say, I hope) is the high water mark. It’s high enough that they’ve closed the road I live on; Krissy and Athena can’t get home at the moment. Not that I want them to try.

Naturally, I had to go out into this crap and take a few pictures.

This is what it looks like from the road itself. I should note that where I’m standing on the road here, water is actually running over my toes. On either side east or west of where I’m standing, the water is actually deeper. It’s not so deep that I’m in danger of being swept away, but it’s still no good when the road you live on is well and truly submerged for a half mile in either direction. Note that this picture and the others that follow were taken before the picture above, so the water on this photo isn’t yet as high as it would get.

My driveway. In the center of that mass of water, the water is high enough that it goes halfway up my calf; I know this because I stood in it to see just how deep it was (not one of the smartest things I could have done, I’m sure). Say about ten inches deep. Now, that makes my driveway fairly inaccessible, but at least my driveway doesn’t look like this:

This is the driveway of the neighbor directly south of me. The water here is zooming along at the rate of a brisk jog — at least 5 mph, possibly more (it’s hard to be sure without standing in the middle of it, which I am not about to do). The water you see is falling the foot or so from the driveway into a field, which is usually filled with hay or other such stuff but is currently filled with lots of water and plant detritus. I don’t think these folks should expect to go anywhere anytime soon. I took a small movie of this driveway/river, but my satellite connection is down, and I don’t want to consider posting it while I’m on dial-up. I’ll put it up later.

Here one of my neighbors (in the van) considers trying to drive across the road. From this position, he would inch forward about 20 more feet, stop and then about a minute later reverse out (causing the truck you see here to back up as well). “I stopped the van, but I could still feel it moving sideways,” he said.Yes, that is a good indication that you should indeed rethink your strategy. That dry spot you see there, incidentally, is currently under a bunch of muddy water.

Now, this I found interesting. The spider here has a flotation device, which I suspect is an egg sac (I remember my Charlotte’s Web). I found this spider (and another just like it outside the frame to the right) having a swim in the pond that is my driveway. Hopefully they will both make it out all right; if there’s one thing this wet weather does, it’s to breed swarms of insects, and so I’m all for the spiders taking out as many of them as they can before I have to reach for my swatter.

This is how I know how deep the water in my driveway was. And I’ll thank the lot of you to keep your comments about Hobbit toes to a bare minimum.