Flood Watch - 2011 - Miscellaneous items

It goes up, it goes down. The river that is.  The reason (or part of it anyway)? Manitoba and Saskatchewan have had a lot of rain in the last month or so. Let me say that again...a lot of rain. Since the ground is already saturated, it runs off into low lying areas, like the river basin. So when I said the other day that the river was slowly receding, it really was. It had gone down a whole 3-inches. We were ecstatic. A few of our neighbours were positively beaming. When we've been living with a high water level that hasn't really moved in weeks, it was encouraging to have it move in a positive direction, even though in the grand scheme of things the drop was pretty small. Since then, however, it's gone back up. With the rain that we've had over the past few days and more on the way, it's likely to come up even more. Probably just a few inches, but still. We lost most of our spring to flood woes, now it looks like our summer will also be shot.

Hip-waders. We've really gotten tired of using the boat to get across the driveway. While our driveway is long (300+ feet), the part that's underwater is less than 50 feet. By the time we load up the boat, get in the boat, paddle those few feet, we could have walked across in our hip-waders. Since we have to wear boots anyway in the boat, it's not that much trouble to put on hip-waders instead of the boots. We are not quite ready to give up the boat yet, though. We still plan on using it to get big/heavy items across the water or if the river rises more than we expect, we may be using it to transport ourselves.

Generator. The rain that we had was accompanied by wind, thunder and lightning. That means our electricity is subject to outages. When we are heavily relying on pumps to keep our basement dry, that's not good news. We had an incident last week, where the power was out for about 10 minutes. That doesn't seem like a long time, but that's about how much time it takes for the water to start backing up into the basement. Luckily, we had our new best friend on the job. Our shiny new generator. Gary had it all set up and ready to go; it took him just minutes to have it up and running.

Here's a photo of our new BFF:

Pretty, huh?

That's it for now.

Disclaimer: If you came here for information about the Manitoba Flood 2011, you've probably come to the wrong place. This post (or series of posts) will focus only on my backyard and house. If you are looking for general information regarding the flood, try the Government of Manitoba website, which can be found here or here for more area specific information regarding the Cartier, St. Francois Xavier and Headingley areas.