Storm!

I woke up early this morning thinking we must be getting a downpour. I looked out the window to realize it wasn’t raining yet. What I was hearing was the large tamarack tree across the street getting pummeled by 50mph winds. In my mind a did a quick inventory and when I realized that we don’t have any trees within damage distance to our house I went back to sleep for another hour.

All last week they were warning us that there was this big storm coming in on Thursday that was supposed to drop 12″ of rain between Friday and Sunday with a small break on Saturday. The last time they predicted this it ended up being overly dramatic and it barely showered. As Friday came along the rains and high winds they said were coming never really showed. I guess you could say we let down our guard and it was business as usual. Tom even left to go pig hunting this morning.

Look Ma! No feet! This was taken after the storm broke. The water had subsided substantially as when it was still raining this was about 12″ deeper.

I eventually woke up at 6am to the same sounds as before but it was louder. The tree was still being abused by the wind but now it was raining forcefully. It was time to get up anyways, so I got dressed and headed out to milk the goats. The barn was still nice a dry since earlier this week we decided to get sandbags which we then placed around the goat barn. So far, so good. I got the goats milked and let the chickens and turkeys out and headed back to the safety of the house.

By 7am it was raining even harder. I couldn’t believe it. Our gutters and downspouts couldn’t keep up with the water. Unfortunately we had left our large 75 gallon recycle bin open and the water from the gutters was just pouring into it. In less than 45 minutes the bin was overflowing. Damn! We should have gotten rain barrels. The torrential downpour only lasted about an hour and eased off to a steady hard rain.

At 8am I threw on a jacket, my muck boots, and headed out the door to see what the damage was. The chickens and turkeys got off light. There is some pooling of water in their yard, but their coops are both dry. Not that the birds seem to care. They were out in the rain eating worms. The rabbits were nice a cozy. The large Coast Live Oak tree that their hutch is under took the wind like a champ and didn’t even drop a small limb.

The future goat barn location.

I knew when I saw the newly formed 6″ deep creeks running down what used to be walkways between our garden beds that I was going to be in trouble. The sandbags did what they could but they just weren’t quite high enough and there was water pooling in one corner of the goat barn. We’ve got about 12″ of deep litter in the barn, so the water was pretty high to create a pool. The goat yard was even worse. The creeks running down the yard were met with another new creek coming from our neighbor’s property and they were emptying out in the goat yard. After about an hour of moving mud I was finally able to get positive drainage again to get water away from the goats. Did I mention goats HATE water? The sandbags were back to working when I walked away soaked and muddy just hoping that the water continues to move.

When we were throwing down sandbags this past week we brought up the idea of moving the goat barn. Not an easy task as we’ll have to tear it down and rebuild it. As I was moving mud I looked over the yard and saw that the place we’re planning to move it to was the only spot in the goat yard that wasn’t flooded. I foresee another project happening within the next couple of weeks.

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