Tropical Storm Isaac

I’m sure you’ve heard that there is a tropical storm headed through the Gulf of Mexico right now, right? We were lucky to escape the brunt of the storm since we live in eastern part of South Florida. I know, big sigh of relief! Our area was forecasted to receive  just some rain and a little wind from the outer bands of the storm. Yeah, that’s not exactly what happened. For two days, we were…

hit with feeder band, after feeder band of storms, to the point where our entire property flooded. Our area received 14 inches of rain, but I think we have a foot and a half of water in some areas of our yard.

This is the view from the road. I took it yesterday morning, before the rest of the rains came.

Where we live, we have canals where the rain water from our yards and roads are supposed to drain into. Usually, this process works well. They drain the water from these canals before a big storm, so that the water has a place to go. Then, as the canals fill, they empty the little canals into bigger canals and eventually the water makes it’s way to the ocean, and I’m sure a few other places too. They have to release only so much water into the ocean at a time, so they have some kind of complicated procedure to determine when to open each canal… Let me just say, I’m not an expert, or even well schooled in what happens after the water makes it’s way out of my yard, I’m just giving you the basics. Basically, the system was not ready for the amount of rain that we received over the past few days.

This canal, which in directly in front of our house, was almost empty before the storm. I don’t have a picture of the canal empty, but this is what it looks like now.

As of yesterday morning, it was almost completely full. Once the canals reach a certain height, they can’t take on more water, so the water can’t drain from our yards. So, now, our yards look like this.

And this…

That picture is from yesterday morning too, before the rest of the rain came and added a few inches more. If you remember, we had the shed put on concrete blocks to keep it from flooding. In this case, it didn’t help.

The two paddocks on both sides of the driveway are about a foot below the level of the driveway, so for the water to have come up over the driveway gives you a good idea of how much rain we’ve gotten.

On the first night of the storm, this little tree frog was trying to get out of the rain and got into our house. He almost ended up as a snack for our cats. Poor little dude was so tiny and his heart was beating a mile a minute! As soon as I got him back outside, he hopped right onto the tree by the door, where he seemed to take a few minutes to calm down from all the cat related excitement, before hopping off to safer places.

Our irrigation system is housed in this pretend well. I planted some flowers on the right side, but you can’t see them under all that water. I’m glad my brother rebuilt the well house a few months ago, or I’m pretty sure it would be gone by now.

This is a little closer.

When the house was built, the builder only put one spigot on the far back corner of the house for watering the landscaping with untreated water, as we are on well water. The rest of the spigots are all treated water, which is expensive to use for watering plants. So, I put in this water barrel thinking it would be good to conserve some rain water for irrigation of the landscaping in the front of the house. Unfortunately, with any kind of hard rain, it overflows. It takes about two or three minutes to fill up, then it’s all over the place! The hose that is attached at the bottom is wide open anytime we are having a hard rain, so that it drains out into the yard. But the kind of rains that we saw in the past two days were simply too much for it.  The entire porch flooded, as did the plant beds around it – over and over and over again. Looks like we will have to revise this plan a bit.

With all this water, some people decided to have some fun with it. Like my neighbors’ son. He is the epitome of a boy’s boy. He was out on his four-wheeler splashing through the puddles at one point, and then when the water got deeper, he pulled out the canoe to take a few laps in the front yard.

I wish I had a tenth of his energy! He’s actually out in the canoe again as I type this, with two of his dogs as passengers.

With all this rain, you might wonder about what the insects below all that water do to survive. Well, if you are a red ant, you do this…

And this…

Last night, when if finally stopped raining, I looked out and saw that the black birds were feasting away in our side yard, probably on those ants…

I know that we were so blessed that the worst that happened to us is that our shed flooded. I know that many of the people in this area were much harder hit. Roads washed out, canals over flowed, cars were driven into ditches, houses flooded. You can check out some amazing pictures from our local paper here. We are in Loxahatchee Groves, right next to Wellington, where a lot of those pictures were taken, so you can see how lucky we were.

Tonight they are forecasting more rain for us. Let’s just hope we stay lucky through the next set of storms.

Hope you are having a much better end of summer than we are!

Thanks for stopping by!

Eliesa