A sliver of the Texan99 intermittent pond at flood stage. In a very dry year that's prairie all the way across. The surface area right now is probably 3 acres, but it's shallow at this end. That's good, because the gators like to stay in the deeper part off the left, near the road.
The sidewalk in the lower right corner adjoins our downstairs porch at ground level; this picture was taken from the upstairs porch on the living-floor level. Because the perspective is flattened, you can't see that the water would have to rise another foot or two to hit the sidewalk. Even with another 3+ inches last night, the pond level seems stable. Rain is in the forecast for another couple of days, but maybe not as extreme as it has been all this week.
Although my laptop arrived apparently unscathed on Tuesday, it did develop an alarming internal clicking noise after some lightning yesterday. It's old enough to be out of warranty and beyond the maximum coverage of Apple's tech support contract, so I decided to take the plunge and order a new one. Apple amused me by promising delivery today, a prospect I declined to take seriously, but we'll see! Roads are closed all over the coastal region today. Nevertheless, the trucks can drive through some pretty high water, so as long as the sorting facilities are operating, they may work miracles, depending on where the laptop is coming from. I was actually surprised not to be told there would be a long wait on delivery, as I'd been hearing that anything with a chip in it was a problem. Must have been in stock somewhere.
Our septic field is underwater, never an ideal condition, but it's so situated that it doesn't drain either to the house or to the pond, and it probably will be fine in a few days once the rain stops. Nothing really fazes a septic system as long as solids don't get into the tiny perforations in the leachfield pipes; I understand that if those get plugged up, you just abandon those pipes and lay in a new drainfield. This experience highlights the wisdom of the rules requiring so many feet of distance between the field and either the house or the pond. Septic tanks are more environmentally defensible than almost any municipal system, as long as you can ensure that, when flooded, they don't start draining into a public waterway.
7 comments:
Putting in a plug for UPS: I ordered electronics from Apple yesterday around 3pm, which apparently came from a center in Tennessee. They just arrived, before 6:30pm, next day service. I'm impressed.
"Neither snow, nor sleet, nor dead of night,
Nor alligators floating in the streets,
Will keep the Brown from their appointed rounds."
At the point where the pond next to me was within a few feet of my floor level, I'd feel compelled to check on the water body or channel the pond drains into to see that it still has space left to take up the overflow (I assume that's where the pond is now as you said it's remained static even after more rainfall). Just to be on the safe side- but this is mostly out of my experience living my entire life in hills that would never flood in a dry climate. I'm just working off my thinking process for drainage in my architecture background.
If the local 'pond' gets up to a few feet of my floor level, I'll need an ark.
The max pond level was a few feet vertically (more like 25 feet horizontally) from the concrete garage floor. The lowest living floor level is ten feet above that. All the electrical outlets and the AC unit are at least 3-4 feet above the garage floor.
The pond drains into the ditch outside the fence at the road, which drains through a culvert to another ditch, which after 100 yards or so drains into a very large pasture that gradually drains into the bay about half a mile away. The culvert is about 15 feet above bay level, absent a storm surge. During Hurricane Harvey, with 12 inches of rain and 7-8 feet of storm surge, there was no drainage problem at all. If this setup can handle 22 inches of rain in three days, I suspect we're OK even for things stacked on the floor of the garage.
It's really hard to get the water level up 3 feet around here, because it's so flat: almost no channeling. Our 17 feet of elevation are nearly the high point for a mile or so in every direction. There's hardly anything above 25 feet in the whole county. I don't think rain alone could hurt us; it would take an unheard-of storm surge that could prevent a huge rain from draining off. Katrina pushed a 30-foot storm surge at Gulfport, they say, but the shoreline there is completely different. We're behind a barrier island, aa bay, a peninsula, and another bay. Of course, if I thought for one minute that we were facing a 30-foot storm surge, I'd be out of here and would consider myself lucky if anything remained of the whole county afterwards. There wouldn't be a building or a tree standing.
If the local 'pond' gets up to a few feet of my floor level, I'll need an ark.
Nah. Get a hydroplane. It'd make a nice companion to your motorcycle, even if you got to use it in your local pond only occasionally.
Eric Hines
Only 0.06 inches in the rain gauge this morning! Woohoo!
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