Well, as many of you know, we got flooded again this last June, so two years in a row. And even though we had done a TON of dirt work, grading, etc after the last flood, it proved to be not enough for this flood. After two years in a row of barely saving our house, we thought we should really rethink why this was happening, what we could and couldn’t control, and what we should do about it. Obviously, moving is not an option. This is the big issue right here.
That is the ditch, across the street, in front of our house. The length of this spans almost exactly the same length of our property. On the other side of this ditch, are hundreds of anchors of farmland. It is apparent that just about everything around, is draining to the farmland, the farmland is draining to the ditch, and the ditch doesn’t even come close to handling the amount of water it gets. So it tops over (the road was about 8 inches covered the last flood) and sends all of the water to our property.
What makes it even worse, is the only place the ditch drains to, is the ditch in front of our property, so we get 100% of what can’t fit in the ditch itself.
To be fair, many, many others got flooded as well in both of these weather events, they were massive events, but we are really only concerned with trying to keep it from happening again. This last event, Vivian and I were on the front porch for hours, with a puch broom and snow shovel, trying to keep the water from coming into the house. It made it to the threshold, but not the house. 🙂
So, let’s talk about the porch for a moment, as this is where the danger to the house comes from.
Two main areas that the water has been coming from at the porch. This opening here is where most of the water came from that really threatened the house; it was rushing in like a river. We already had the raised bed gardens up, but we just finished that small block wall this last week, it’s that last piece to all of this.
That’s what it looks like from the outside. Alone it would not have been enough, but with the other work we have done, I think it will be great.
So next was that the water was coming in from the openings between the three raised bed gardens. So we expanded the Cedar outside of the raised beds , and turned them into a wall. Then we created a burm in front of those as well.
The next issue was to the left of that, by the driveway. The porch opens right to the driveway, and a bunch of water would come in from there as well and just dump into the porch. So Vivian created a really nice burm there as well and really did an amazing jum of getting grass to grow on it and deep.
We are still allowing it to grow, so really haven’t cut it down yet but it really looks like it should do pretty well in a flood.
But none of this actually addressed the real issue, which was water coming over the road like a flash flood, and basically making a river of our entire property. What we did for that was to build a flood wall, directly across from the ditch. The floodwall angles back a bit toward our property, and spans the whole property, except for the last 15 feet or so on each side.
The idea is that we know the water will be coming, we can do nothing to change that. What we fell we can change is the direction of the water. If we put it to the two ends of our property, where we have already create gullies for the water to travel and do it early enough, we feel like there will be a much less chance of it overwhelming the center of our property, where the hous is.
The last real big issue we had, was that on the right side of the house, the water would come around the house, and directly hit our shop, washing out the dirt that the shop sits on. So we built this.
That will keep the water moving in its a natural flow, but push it just a few more feet out. Allowing it to get past the shop and run its course on down to the lake.
We are certainly in no hurry to try all of this out, but we feel pretty good about it.
