The Floods Came Up

What a way to ring in the New Year! At 11:30 last night there was a frantic banging on our door. It was the neighbor telling us the street was flooding. Sure enough, I looked outside (with camera in hand) and the above picture is what we saw. This is the result of 2 hours of rains and floods. Needless to say we hit our knees and prayed for the rains to stop and the drains to clear.

Our house is on high ground, so we felt pretty safe, but look at our poor neighbors across the street. At this point the rain was still coming down very fast and the floods were rising with amazing rapidity.

Sean went out into the wide world to see what he could do to help. My nesting instincts kicked in and I washed dishes, vacuumed and did laundry. I felt like the pioneer women who would not leave their homes in Independence until their homes were spotless. In case we had to evacuate (which I was dead-set against) I didn't want clean-up crews combing through my house thinking we were filthy pigs. The tables and counters were covered with boxes and buckets of food storage from the garage (our garage is about two feet lower than the first floor of our house).

The mailbox illustrates the water level at about 1:00am. At this point I decided, come what may, I was going down with my ship. I can't decide if I was being stubborn, brave or just plain stupid. I was not going to leave my house. All the bedrooms are upstairs, and if the water got that high on my house, all of the neighbors would no longer have houses. I figured I was pretty safe. Sean continued to pop in and out until about 2:30am giving me updates on the neighbors and all of the other streets in the area that were flooding.

Then, as if this all weren't strange enough, it started to snow. Hard, heavy flurries of sticking snow - snow that did not melt, snow that did not turn into water on contact and slide off the roofs and add to the rising flood waters. After about an hour of snow, the precipitation subsided and the floods began to recede. It was a miracle. Our neighbor's house was spared by mere inches. Oh, and did I mention our house is 500 feet above sea level? At the top of a hill that slopes steeply over the distance of 3 miles? Apparently, the storm drains clogged within a large triangular area; and we, who never dreamed of seeing a flood on our street, actually lived through one.

(The snow line marks the flood line.)

Happy New Year.

Video of water and snow