First I want to thank the people that supported me last year and the people that sent me a gift card for a local garden center. The biggest extra for me was purchasing the inline fertilizer pump for $20 so I don’t have to mix and haul to all the garden spots that need a fertilizer boost. I mostly purchased supplies for the garden this spring, and it was very helpful. I took it you wanted to be anonymous, so I asked NinetyWt to thank them for me.
A separate thanks goes to NinetyWt that has been actively helpful the last year.
For the people that donated for the ham fund after Christmas I also give thanks. I used that and the money I already had to purchase a motherboard and CPU so the computer is stable again. Enough on that, this is a very condensed flood story.
On June 7, 2008 the first deluge came as an ominous dark cloud mass that started the flood, the results of which I’ve been dealing with for a year. Two different dams holding back lakes had partial failures, and almost went totally. It took a few days to go beyond high water to something that flooded the garage, storage shed and the house basements. The main basement only flooded to about 3 inches deep, thanks to 3 pumps at some times. The middle basement was kept to only maybe an inch of water. The outer basement with outside access had water get about 2 and a half feet high, because You can’t stay awake forever and eventually having to use the high volume gas pump every two hours gets missed because you absolutely have to sleep at least one more hour and your worse than a drunk from missed sleep.
The basement shifted around and the walls and ceiling in the house cracked. The front door shifted out of square by about an inch and the door was jammed. The house eventually settled back into a close to original alignment after two months. The garage flooded about one and a half feet deep. The storage shed flooded about two and a half feet above the floor. Dad was a carpenter and had wood and construction material stored all over the place and lots of it got wet. The landscape timbers floated away and then of course the garden soil.
The flood went down and most of the yard was bare of grass and almost no plants. It did fill up with weeds and crab grass during the summer last year. The yard had a thin coating of super slick slime that would make your feet whip out from under you when you walked in the yard. It was a very odoriferous slime too. The only way not to end up on the ground covered in slime was to always walk with a fork or pole or something that poked into the ground while you walked. I lost many perennials and the survivors are way smaller and still recovering. I planted some plants I still had in the former garden so we didn’t have to see just brown muck out the windows. Only the beans and basil did good. One hardy rose lived. I had two pumpkins the size of softballs in the area that the flood receded from first which had less of the bad water evaporate on it.
I had to rip out the rooms in the basement my dad had put in when we were kids. The whole basement was loaded with stuff to throw out We removed some stuff to the garage where it still sits. The basement had a layer of cold water about 50F on it until about the middle of August. At that point it was a race to seal the basement floor, before the water table went back up. This spring what I sealed mostly held. I still have a quarter of the basement to seal up. I had to remove the fiberglass insulation from the basement ceiling. Basically I gutted the basements. I pressure washed the main basement and the middle basement. I replaced or cleaned out all the duct work…
Moving all those sand bags was no picnic either. The local prisoners hauled them into place, but nobody helps to remove them. The city wouldn’t even remove the pallets they left when they picked up flood debris, because nobody authorized it. The thing was they said that they would remove the pallets and sandbags when they offered to bring them.
The garage just got left and is still waiting for a cleaning of the flooded cabinets and tools dad had in there. Wooden tool boxes keep water in there until you dump them. The storage shed just got rearranged after some of the stuff was tossed. It is still in need of clean up. The outer basement that flooded 2 and a half feet deep had stuff removed so I could do work in there, but it never got cleaned up and lots of stuff to be sorted through is back in it.
This year I built new garden beds, and have moved a lot of soil. I moved a whole truck bed of horse manure into one of the new bed sections, allowing me to fill it. Somebody hauled away their soil from around there house this year and I managed to load and haul a lot to in back of our house. The garden beds may be built and planted, but we have no yard yet. I did move some of the grass that still existed to the hillside where I would have never got seed to start. So we still have almost no lawn, and I only will get to seeding the most important places by the house this year. The neighbor had some tall evergreens die, and this being the person it is we will have to look at large dead trees until they fall in 20 years.
I accomplished a lot, but looking at what is done and what is left makes me feel overwhelmed again. What I listed as being done, glosses over all the work I and ma put in. We accomplished a lot. During the flood we got a little help, but for the most part we got no help. The government and volunteers cleaned up the Wisconsin river flood area, but nobody cleaned up the debris along the Fox river. I can’t say how much clean up was done along the Baraboo river either. Probably not much except right by the interstate.
I hope to put up a few pictures, but decided to get this up now.