what a day ...

Well, as you all know, the day started like this:

and this:

And the farrier came on time (!) to trim hooves and replace horse shoes.

And I went to work.

And it was bright and sunny.

And about 2pm  the National Weather service gave warnings about Dreadful Thunderstorms.

And all the porch windows at home were open, and the door to the porch and the door to the bedroom deck were open.

And the storm was going to start sometime around 4pm.

So I dashed out of work at about 3:45, and the clouds were magnificently threatening, and I tried to use the camera on the phone but I couldn't figure it out on the run (so to speak).

And I got home in time to close the doors and windows, Hooray!

But before I got to the house I saw water across the road - and it wasn't raining yet.

I saw my road foreman neighbor walking toward me. "Ray, what is going on?"

"I think the beaver dam just let go", he said.  "The brook just ran out of the bank into my yard." Oh no.

Oh yes.  Here's what I drove through to get to the house:

Where's the culvert? Where's the bank of the brook?  That's not dirt road you see between the phone poles.  That's water, running down the hill through that newly-reconstructed driveway.

All this happened about 4:15. By 4:30 everything looked quite normal. But like Ray said, when several olympic swimming pools worth of water come down all at once, it's quite a flood.  He gets to pull that tree out of the culvert tomorrow.

My part of the brook stayed in its banks but the sump pump was working like crazy. WHY?  I opened the cellar door.  3 inches of water in the basement. WHY?

There's a drain in the floor.  When I had the stream dredged, the man doing the work remembered that there was a drain pipe from the cellar through the stream bank - he found it and fixed it.   "Remember to cover the end in the fall so it doesn't freeze up." I did that, too.

The cellar floor is maybe 6 1/2 or 7 feet  below ground level. The drain pipe comes out  about two feet above the streambed.  The water in the photo above is about 5 feet deep. So the water backed into the basement through the drain.  If it hadn't been for the sump pump, who knows how much water I might have found?

And now I know why the shopvac and I are about to spend an hour in the basement.

Oh yuck.  When it rains for 3 days and you get runoff water in the basement, you clean up water.  When a flooded brook backs water into your cellar, it's flood water and you clean up MUD.  I used the broom to push most of the muddy water (think "soup") down the drain, but I will have to put fans down there to dry it out and then use the shop vac on the "mud dust".  I will pour a couple of buckets of water down the drain to clear the mud from the drain.  Thankfully the sump pump does not seem to be full of mud, but I may call the sump pump guy to come and make sure.  I think I'm going to have to close the floor drain. Water I can deal with. Mud, not so much.