The Great Flood of 2011

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Sharkey
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The Great Flood of 2011

Post by Sharkey »

Like the rest of the world, we here in Oregon have been having our share of rain. Three inches on Friday night/Saturday morning, four inches Saturday and Saturday night, three inches since 7AM this morning = 9 inches over 48 hours.

The creek was running up a bit at the beginning of this weather event. When I came home from town last night at 6PM, the creek was at the top of the banks.

About 9:30PM, the spring quit. I had already switched over to the backup water supply (roof water pumped at pressure out of a 55 gallon barrel).

This morning at 7AM, the creek was over the banks and still rising. 4PM today, the rain tapered off and I went out to take some photographs.

The creek enters my property at the southeast corner, runs north for a while, turns west and exits about the middle of the western property line. There are many bends and turns in the creek, along with side channels between it and the county road. This morning, the bends were gone, the water was making a straight line out of the creek bed and across my fields. Nearly all of my lower pasture, an area of 10-12 acres was under swiftly flowing water. The neighbor's house was completely surrounded by muddy water, which was up to the second step of their front door.

I don't have a stitching program, so here's a quick Photoshop of three frames of the scene:

Image

My driveway coming down from the house enters the photo on the right and disappears under the water at the garden. In some places, there is over a foot of fast moving water over the road. The bridge over the creek pokes up in the distance above the garden gate. At a minimum, I have lost most, if not all of the gravel on the top of the driveway. I'll be lucky if there isn't a deep washout where the worst of the water crosses. I'm also concerned about the creek bank alongside the driveway, and the approach underpinnings of the bridge. This much water causes severe erosion of the sandy soil and soft bottom land where it scrubs hard on the creek bank. Effectively, I am trapped, I wouldn't want to drive through that water unless is was a drop-dead emergency.

This photo shows only a small portion of the flooding, it extends from far upstream to the right, and all across the pasture to the left, then continuing downstream to the property line.

Just after this photo was taken, I was taking a photo looking from downstream back up to the garden area when I heard a loud "wooshing", like hard wind in the trees, or a sudden waterfall. Two vehicles driving on the county road stopped. I could hear rocks and debris moving up on the hillside above the road, and see rivulets of muddy water spilling off the roadbed and into the creek. The driver of one got out, then got back in and they both backed down the road in the direction that they had come.

I called a neighbor on the ham radio and they drove over to investigate. A landslide had occurred from the north side of my property, taking out a gouge of the hillside six feet deep and up the hill as far as could be seen. Trees, mud and large rocks completely covered the road. It sounded like a freight train coming down the hill! Even though I was on the opposite side of the creek, I considered running away!!

It only took the county about 45 minutes to show up with heavy equipment to clear it away, about an hour's work, pitching the debris over the bank and into the creek. No environmental damage there, eh?

I have concerns that this slide came from high on the hillside, which might mean that the trail up to my spring has been damaged, perhaps washed out in a section. It will be a couple of days before I can get up there to assess the damage and (hopefully) get the spring water running to the house again.

I guess the good news is that the power has stayed on and the phone still works. The rest of it will just have to be fixed up after the weather improves.
rlaggren
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Post by rlaggren »

Damn, Sharkey,

This is like reading the raw feed from one of those embedded reporters at the front lines! Hope your lines stay up for the next installment. All us poor slugs dying of boredom in warm (inside anyway), dry, quiet backwaters can't wait to hear. <G>

Luck.

Rufus
Mark R. Obtinario
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Post by Mark R. Obtinario »

Here in SW WA state we have had just about as much rain.

And it has warmed up so much that a lot of the snow in the mountains has been washed down the hill--several of the area ski areas have shut down due to lack of snow.

All I can say Mr. S is be glad you are stuck on your side of the creek. Finding a way home when there is no way home can be a real PITA.

I hope and pray that when the water recedes you will be pleasantly surprised and not greatly disappointed in what you discover.
Bob
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Post by Bob »

I hope everything works out for you! Amazing how when these disasters happen all of our "mundane" problems seem to vanish out the window.. Some kind of cleanser! That is some beautiful land you got there!
Wherever I am...I am home.
Sharkey
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Post by Sharkey »

Yesterday in the evening the rains let up, just misting some overnight. This allowed the creek to recede back into it's banks. Today the sun was out some, so I took a photo from the same location as the panorama to show what the pasture and driveway look like in more normal circumstances:

Image

As expected, all of the driveway that was under water lost its gravel topcoat, it's all heaped in bars out in the pasture, waiting for me to come with a shovel and pick it up to be put back in the 3-4" ruts carved into the roadway.

There is a lot of new soil in the fields, sand and loam that precipitated out of the flood waters. I did lose quite a lot of the bank at the "S" curve by the garden, this worries me some. The bridge came through it OK, although I won't be able to ascertain the condition of the bank on the upstream side of the bridge until the water clarifies, there's still too much mud to see anything through the water to see if the bottom and bank have eroded much.

Downstream, it looks like I lost a little bit of bank, but not as much as I expected. I think that the beavers will be pissed, all of the sticks that made up their lodge are gone. This means that they will be gnawing double time on all the small trees around the creek to make up for lost material.

Up on the road, I found that I now have a new water feature on the property. The source of yesterday afternoon's landslide was apparent:

Image

Formerly, this was a fully wooded stream bed. The water ran over rocks, fallen logs, moss, ferns, etc. Apparently, the soil became too unstable from all the rain and the whole ravine flushed like a big toilet. All of that is gone, all the soil too. Now the water runs in a series of cascading waterfalls on bare bedrock. The whole waterway has been scarified. Before the slide, you couldn't see the water until is was within ten feet of the road. This photo shows about 150 feet with probably a 50 foot elevation change.

The downhill side of the road didn't fare well, either. After crossing the asphalt, the debris flow started a similar excavation on it's way to the creek, only even wider than above the road.

About another 50 feet west of this slide, the hillside let go at the shoulder of the road, and now there's a sheer drop-off of 40-50 feet down to the creek:

Image

The county is going to have to do some serious repairs to the shoulder of the road in these two places. This road is a key backup route for tsunami evacuation and as an alternate route for emergency vehicles and regular traffic when the main highway is under water at Cushman. The county is ~very~ attentive to maintenance on this small side road. Witness the speed with which they had equipment out here on a Sunday night on a holiday weekend.

Anyhow, the point of this walk was to go up and see how my spring had fared, as see if the big washout had crossed and obliterated the trail up to my spring.

On the first part of the spring trail there are several places where water seeps out of the hillside and attempts to run down the path. I keep making diagonal trenches with the toe of my boot to direct that water over the side of the trail into the small ravine. The last of these seeps usually has about as much water as a fast running garden hose. I was very surprised to see a much stronger flow of water and amazed to see that the bed of this seep had also been scoured out like the big washout, but on a smaller scale. All the way up the hillside, it had carved a two-foot wide by about six inch deep cut in the underbrush and topsoil. It hadn't cut all the way to bedrock, but it had a very similar appearance to the big slide.

About halfway to the spring was the area I was worried about, a place on a level landing in the trail where the water you see coming down the big washout crosses the path. I was very afraid that the slide had started above the trail, or that the falling soil from below had undermined the trail and I would now have a big chasm to cross.

As it turned out, the slide had either stopped or begun right at the edge of the trail at this crossing. I could look down from the trail as see the whole slide area and the road at the bottom:

Image

I'm still none too pleased, as there is now a sheer face of exposed soil right on the very edge of the trail (right hand side of the photo), which wraps around the slide like a big letter "C". This face is 20 feet or so in height, and I fear that additional erosion and slides will push the slide under the trail. Not much I can do about it, I guess.

Finally, up to the spring and to see what damage was wrought there. More concerns that the big scouring had taken away everything, including my collection barrel plumbing, etc.

I've never seen so much water coming down the rock face of the spring bed. There had been some flushing of the area. For the last couple of years, I've been using the fist-to-shoebox sized rocks that come washing down the draw to direct and divert water either into or around my catchment reservoir. All of this was gone, and a huge plume of raging water was pounding down on the entire area. One side of the catchment was eroded by this water, and the catchment itself was completely filled with rocks, sand, and debris.

At first, I thought I'd just bag it for now and come back after the worst of the water had subsided, but I climbed up the rock face to the top where the fairly level stream bed from the spring runs. By rearranging some large rocks and shifting the position of an ancient section of large tree trunk, I managed to get the majority of the water to cascade down the right hand side of the rock face, away from the catchment.

Back down at the reservoir, I began digging out the screen and tail pipe, placing the material on the side of the catchment that had been eroded. Eventually, I got to the bottom and cleared the output pipe and the reservoir began to drain. After cleaning the screen and replacing it in the catchment, I made some additional adjustments to some of the few remaining rocks, used a couple of sections of roof gutter that I keep around to divert some of the water around the catchment, and generally got the flow under control so I could begin cleaning and then filling the collection barrel.

After that, it was all pretty routine. I'll have to make several trips back to the spring in the next few weeks to adjust the amount of water I divert as the flow decreases, but that's just what you have to do when you're your own municipal utility.

As for the slide area, it is loud, the sound of falling water drowns out almost all other sounds in my yard, including the creek. It literally sounds like a huge waterfall coming down the mountain on the other side of my property. Not only that, but I can see much of the slide and the water flowing in it from my front yard. Some people pay to have these things built from artificial materials, then pay the electric company to run pumps 24/7 to keep them flowing. I got one for free and it's self-powered!
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GoodClue
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Great flood ...

Post by GoodClue »

Sharkey, glad you, your horse and your property are okay, and with such good spirit ... Years back our 41 acres in Aguilar had torrential rains, created major mud flows ... desert, no ground cover ... had always wondered why the local geography looked like it did, then understood ... in a FLASH.
No place seems out of harms way ... Australia, Brazil currently hammered ... east and west US coasts ... just takes the right combination of events.
If for any reason you would need help, put out the call ... I'm sure many of us could drop what we were doing and find our way to help.
"ya gotta have art ..."
graydawg
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Post by graydawg »

Hey Mr Sharkey, thats some major damage, wish I still had my little dozer sold it a few years back, maybe the county might do a little work with the road situation like it is, hope so anyway, you sure have a nice place, with the creek running through your property can you dig a nice little pond and stock it, the state will stock a private pond in La, but you then have to advertise, that it is open to the public in a newspaper, allot of people have went that way and of coarse they advertise in some little unknown newspaper, one of the many loopholes in La. the only state under Napoleonic laws, got some good and bad laws, some reasons to stay but getting too many changes now, they are creating any excuse to make money off the public just like everywhere else, its getting pretty bad here, I am seriously considering selling everything except my bus, 66 jeep, and a fishing boat, that would buy me a couple years of travel anyway. I am still working on my bus it's just slow going, dealing with old injuries, money for materials, and trying to live at the same time, I'm sure you of all people know some of what I'm dealing with, but I'll make it, just to damn stubborn to give up or might not have the intellegence to know when to quit. Get after the county, and make then work for the tax dollars they collect, Good luck and enjoyed the update.
James Smith in da GRAYDAWG
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Post by Stealth Camper »

Wow! What's bad is bad! Looks like a lot survived though. I wish you well on the recovery effort!
dburt
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Post by dburt »

Hopefully this was one of those 'one hundered year' floods and won't happen again any time soon. Glad you are ok and did not have worse damage!
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