Homestead mailing list

[Lisa Perry <lkvp AT floydva.net>]

Tvoivozhd wrote:

> We are in the middle of a raging flood equalled only by the 1985 
> flood---all our buildings are above the flood plain---not much but 
> sufficiently.  

Sounds like Giles County was hit worse than Floyd County.  Our driveway 
is there, but washed down to underlying 1 and 2 ft quartz bolders on the 
left-hand side, fortunately there was room to drive up towards the 
right-hand side.  Usually the waterbars at the top of the drive do a 
good job, but this morning we could see they were plugged full of fallen 
leaves-- and last night from 3:00 a.m. on it just pelted rain.  I think 
we got more rain than I heard mentioned on the radio.  Wasn't this storm 
supposed to head in a more northeast direction?  Seems like it headed 
north-northeast. 

The dirt floor in the barn was muddy soup this morning, we had the lawn 
mower and other equipment up on pallets and they just escaped the 
water.  What a mess.

Our root cellar 'basement' under our existing house took in 5-6" of 
water.  We'll be using the wet/dry shop vac we bought and used for the 
aftermath of hurricane Frances, when we took in 5".  We're concerned 
about mold.  The good news is that the new basement under the addition 
stayed dry.

We still had power when we left home.  Last weekend we lost power for 56 
hours from hurricane Ivan.  I had the tub and several pots filled with 
water--just incase.

Clearly, we have some work to do on improving our road and land to be 
better prepared for the next onslaught of rain or severe storm.  Part of 
homesteading, and should be added to the survival list that Tvo and Gene 
made if it isn't on it already, is protecting your investment!  I 
suppose that goes without saying.  We're concerned about the root 
cellar, we're going to have to put on bulkheads around the windows and 
build up the soil and whatnot--to direct the water away.  It is a dirt 
floor old-fashioned root cellar/basement, so some of the water comes in 
no matter what you do.  It was dry as a bone when we bought the 
house--but then our area had been in the fifth year of a five-year drought.

A major secondary black-top road we use to get to work everyday was 
flooded over at a low point--best guess was up to 3' deep.  We turned 
around and went the long way.

The irony to us (my husband and I) is that we moved to sw VA, in the 
Appalachians, from Charleston SC five years ago--and we picked this area 
(after research) because it was  more protected from the weather.  This 
area seemed to experience less extreme weather and had all four 
seasons.  Now we're dealing with storms that are hurricane-related even 
though we moved to the mountains.  Go figure.

Lisa
living in soggy Floyd County, VA