Uh oh . . .

We weren't all that concerned about tropical depression "Lee" before now, but it's definitely time to start preparing for a real storm, I think.   It wasn't a big deal until yesterday.  But it's been moving so slowly (1-2 miles an hour) that it's been sitting offshore gaining strength over the last couple days.  When I woke up this morning at 6 AM our property had ALREADY begun to flood as a result of rain bands on the very edge of the storm.  The storm itself is still offshore getting stronger as we speak.  It's due to come ashore tonight and it'll be hitting Baton Rouge by tomorrow morning sometime.     

But the low area in the front of the house is already starting to flood.

And the horse paddocks that are on the property's highest ground are showing puddles already as well!  NOT good.  

Obviously, Lizzie doesn't mind standing around in water at all.  (Duke, however, has sense enough to be inside.)

Jerry is here today helping Mark get ready for the storm.  Given the mess we had out there already at dawn this morning, we definitely need to prepare for the storm itself before tomorrow.  Usually, the big storm concerns around here are high hurricane-force winds.  But this time, it's the water.  This storm is moving so incredibly slowly that they expect it will remain over south Louisiana for the next three days.  They say we will be getting somewhere between 8 and 20 inches of rain here!     

Mark and Jerry have cleared everything off the front porch because although the rain is the main concern, we'll also be getting winds up to 60 mph so we have to prepare for that as well.  


The first thing they did was get everything off the floor of the garage.  (The house itself is about 2 feet above ground level, but the garage, unfortunately, is not.  If we have a flood, the water  WILL come into the garage.)  The freezer out there is up on concrete blocks so it should be fine.  But there are so many other things on the floor in the garage that will need to be put up somehow so they'll stay dry if the garage floods.

The air conditioners and the generator that sit outside the garage are both up on concrete blocks between 6" and a foot off the ground.  I hope that's enough!


Then they also put up the screw eyes on the stall exterior doors so that I'll be able to use those stall guards to keep the horses all inside during the worst of the storm.

The last time it flooded here was back in December 2006.  Vickie and John had driven down from DC to visit.  Here's a collection of pictures taken as they arrived.  Luckily, they knew where the driveway USED to be before the flood, so  they went ahead and drove on in even though the drive was no longer visible!  And in a Mini, too!  Brave folks.

Vickie and John had to take off their shoes and roll up their pants to get into the house!

The picture below was taken after an earlier flood back in 2004 shortly after we bought this house and had the cottage moved away from the house and into the back pasture.

S0 . . . that's how flooding has looked in the past.  We'll see how it goes this time, after having had the back pasture graded and that pond put in that's supposed to send the water out into the drainage canal that runs down the side of the property.  I guess the critical question is, has the parish cleared the canal enough to allow the property to drain!  As you can see in the 2006 photo below, the canal isn't even visible there, so it obviously hadn't been cleared enough to allow it to drain out into Bayou Paul and ultimately into Spanish Lake as it's supposed to.   It just filled up, ran over and then the whole place turned into a lake. 

The 8 or 10-foot deep x 20 foot wide drainage canal  that runs down the side of our property has filled and overflowed in this 2006 photograph.

Okay.  Enough.  We'll do what we can to get ready and just hope for the best this time.  We DO have flood insurance.  That's a good thing, even though the house itself has never flooded in the past -- unless you count the time the washing machine line broke.    But I'd rather not think about that right now.  What a mess THAT was!  At least this time the mess will stay outside -- I hope!