Flooded Out

With all the rain we've had lately, yesterday everything started flooding. The Plum Creek runs across the road from our house on the other side of a cornfield. The field was already full yesterday morning when I got up and was starting to go over the road. We watched it come up all day and went for a little drive in the afternoon to check out the area. Some places nearby the roads were already starting to wash away.

After Joe left to go to work at 5:00, the power went out at our house. I called Joe, who was getting gas in Hopkinton and he said the power was out there too. Mom said the power was out in Monticello and Dad said Cascade's was out too. Joe came home because they shut the factory down, and before he got home our power came back on.

We went back and forth about whether we should try to evacuate or not. We live in a very flat area, but our trailer and barn sit a little higher than everything else. We decided to go for another drive to check out the situation. We took the Jeep since it has 33" tires and sits up nice and high. We tried one direction, but the water was so high at the T intersection we couldn't tell where exactly the road was. You can see by the road signs that the water was really high.

So then we tried leaving the other direction, which had been flooded all day. We got going and it just kept getting deeper and deeper. We opened our doors and it was just below the frame. Joe decided to keep going because he thought that was the deepest. It wasn't. It got too deep and the current was pushing us off the road toward the creek, where the current was moving super fast. I have never been so scared! Luckily we made it through before we were completely off the road.

Down the road at another T intersection, the road was covered a long ways and the road was starting to wash away, so we only had one direction we could go. We decided we better try to find a way back home before it got any higher. We went all the way around to the other T, but it had gotten a lot worse in the last 15 minutes. We thought maybe we could drive through the field in the back of our house, but it was too muddy, so we were stuck. We ended up staying at my parent's house.

I worried all night about the animals. The kids didn't sleep very well either. Sullivan ended up sleeping in the bed with us, so I kept waking up to check on him. As soon as the kids were finished with breakfast this morning, we packed up and headed for home. My stomach was in knots all the way, hoping that everything was all right and that we could get home. We definitely had good luck. The water was off the roads and we made it!

All the animals were fine and nothing seemed damaged. Our woodpile started floating away and is scattered throughout our backyard and the neighboring cornfield. Luckily our fence stopped most of it. Some of the boxes for my raised beds in the garden were dislodged. Joe's campfire scrap wood had floated away, but we found it about 50 feet away, still in a pile! Other than that, things are just wet and dirty and there are corn stalks everywhere. I consider us very blessed and hope all our neighbors had the same luck!