Summer 2017 Flood

On June 13, 2017, we got a gully washer. Maybe "flood" isn't the right term. We weren't actually underwater, but we sure had water everywhere. We've had raining like this maybe twice before. It's hard to say if the was more severe than the others. It was certainly as severe.

The creek is overflowing the culvert (the culvert is plugged up). It flows over the yard rather than through the culvert.

Here's the flow going behind the shed (you'd have to be familiar with our property to know where this is. Part of the water is from the culvert overflow, but there is also a large amount of water coming from the back yard, and down the hill by the boat garage.

This is the stream coming from behind the shed and flowing down into the pond.

The pond is pretty full. I think this is the highest I've ever seen it. The neighbor changed the overflow so that the pond maintains a higher level than it had been since we've moved here. He did that last year. That's an umbrella handle in the top left of the photo. It was still raining very hard.

You can see the neighbor's wheelbarrow floating in the pond (I didn't know it was his at the time). You can also see the handle (just to the left of the wheelbarrow) of what I discovered was a pond fork/shovel. It came in very handy later.

Here's the crux of the problem (aside from the fact of an over abundance of rain water). The culvert gets plugged up. I've already begun clearing it here in the photo (see the red arrow for the top of the culvert). Before I started cleaning it, it was completely covered over, so much so that I actually had to study the area to figure out where the culvert actually was. You can see a little bit of the erosion around the culvert on the right side (yellow arrow).

Here's what the culvert looks like when its all cleaned out.

The next task was cleaning the spillway. It has a grate over it an collect debris. It's half way cleaned out in the photo here. It was two wheelbarrow loads. It's a little tricky doing this because you have to climb down off the bank of the pond onto the spillway itself, and then heave the debris up over a fence into the wheelbarrow. Yes, I've done it several times before.

The final task was cleaning some of the debris out of the pond itself. Here's the debris I collected. You can see the boat I used in the background. The pile amounted to two boat loads. Remember the handle that was floating in the water? Well it was a plastic fork, made just for cleaning stuff (primarily weeds & algae) out of pond. I collected it as part of the first load, and it came in very handy on the second.