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I wanted to tell you guys what happened this past week. Give you a little bit of the story and my thoughts on what was going through our heads as the flood waters were rising, tell you how we dealt with it all, how the animals and garden fared with over 17 inches of rain in under 48 hrs.

Let’s start with where we live. Saline, Louisiana, is a tiny town. Well, a village actually. We have one set of flashing lights in town, a general store, bank, and a library that actually my mom helped get funded and expanded. You see they determine what libraries get funded based on usage and since she was using it so much homeschooling my younger siblings, they upgraded from a little trailer to a proper building and even expanded to have a little classroom area and bathrooms too! You may laugh but that’s a pretty big deal for a village with a population of 400 or so!

We live on a thirteen hundred acre reservoir (that’s for you Jim, you know who you are), and our house sits about 8 or 9 feet above the waterline of the lake.

It’s monday the 7th, a great day for transplanting and setting out vining crops, tomorrow is going to be a great day for planting a lot of other seed. So Catie, the boys and I get to it. We’re transplanting tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, broccoli, and all sorts of things. Oh by the way, I learned a really cool and super fast way to plant my transplants and to easily lay out where things are going to be planted. You see, I think things through weeks and months into the future, where things will be situated so that in 2 months I can do something else with the space, and whenever someone else is helping me plant the garden, I can’t just say plant all these things over there, or else I’m not using my space effectively. So it’s kind of a pinch point in gardening to be the only person with the plan and not being able to get everyone on the same page. But with this new method I’m able to mark out exactly where things get planted or transplanted, set all the plants next to the spot, show what gets planted and then move onto the next spot to mark out the next things. I can go fast enough that I can keep ahead of 2 or 3 workers and still have time to transplant some things myself. But I’ll tell you guys all about that later, right now we’re talking about the flood.

So there we are, sunshine, butterflies, planting the garden, rockin it! We got twice as much done as I expected us to just cause I stumbled on a new method, I’m super happy with the results. I was pushing to get as much done that day because we were expecting rain the next day. We had no idea how bad the rains were going to be.

We have a bull calf and a large pig that need to go to the freezer. So we’ve been avoiding going to the grocery store in an attempt to empty our large chest freezer so we will have room for 400 lbs of beef and almost 200 lbs of pork in a month or two. So our food stores are low, I mean, guys, we hadn’t been to the store in a month. So as you can imagine, we were scraping to get decent meals put together with what is left in the chest freezer. In fact, Catie was going to go to the grocery store that day but I needed help planting the garden before the rain hit, so she stayed to help me instead of going grocery shopping.

The next morning, the forecast was pushed back to afternoon rain, so out to the garden I go to finish up what was left undone the day before, planted a bunch of squash, beans, all sorts of things. Then the rain begins. It rained 7 inches of rain that evening, 3 inches that night, and somewhere around 7 to 10 inches the next day.

Tornado watch that upgraded to a tornado warning, the storm cell was headed right towards us, rotation in the clouds, and some of the most wicked looking lightning I’d ever seen. The rain was falling so heavy that we couldn’t see 300ft outside. We had our radios, some water, first aid, I had the chainsaw and dewalt reciprocating saw ready to take with us, and a plan to head for the window that is right above our house’s crawl space in a sheltered corner of the house, putting a roof, and floor, as well as brick walls between us and the storm. We were a little concerned… But the storm passed and things settled down. We got to sleep after 1 that night, and the next day is when the flooding started to get bad. We had family, friends, and neighbors trapped away from home because all the roads leading to and from our area were flooded. And here we were, weeks overdue to get basic groceries. Don’t get me wrong, we were prepared to eat for another couple months, but it wouldn’t have been fun meals. We wouldn’t have starved but we wouldn’t have butter or lots of normal food items.

Real quick I wanna bring up some basic preparedness things. I’m not one of those stock up a bunker to survive the end of the world preparedness types. But I think you’re a fool to not have your basic needs met if you are able to do so. I understand that not everyone can afford to stock up on most of their basic food and other daily needs, but there are some things we can do and should do. You can do what’s called copy canning, which is buying two of a can of tomatoes instead of 1. So if you normally keep 6 cans of tomatoes and you’re going to the store to get 6 cans, this time out you get 12 cans. Then the next time you go to the store, maintain that 12 cans of tomatoes, and pick something like beans, or corn, or whatever the thing is and buy double. Pretty soon you’ll have built up your pantry to the point where you can handle a week or two of not going to the grocery store.

One of the most important things is to be able to clean water for your drinking needs. Being on a lake we have an almost unlimited source of water we could carry in buckets for things like flushing toilets, but we can’t drink that water without getting sick, so we have a gravity fed water purifier. We can take rainwater from our roof or lake water and dump it into the water filter and have clean safe drinkable water. My in-laws were out of water. Lightning struck the water tower and the utility crews couldn’t find the leak because all the ditches were full of water, so they’re out of water for at least a week.

If you don’t have clean drinking water, you die. Plain and simple! First priority when we were deciding what to spend money on was a good reliable gravity powered water filter like a Berkey or Pro-Pur, or any one of the others out there. You see what happens in a flooding event is that the trees root zones loosen up from all the water and then large trees fall down all over the place onto power lines and it can take weeks to get them all repaired. So we knew that we needed to have that need met first.

Case in point, behind our house between us and the lake is a large hickory tree with a tire swing hung from it. It’s a couple feet higher in elevation than the water, well when the water rose, it came up past the swing tree. It took a day before the swing was touching the ground. The tree is leaning pretty bad. Water loosened the roots to the point where it looks like it’s lifted up about 6 or 8 inches on the lake side. That means the tree is probably gonna fall, luckily it’s not leaning towards the house, but Titus and Asher love that tire swing. I’m not looking forward to the day when it’s on the ground. So I’m looking for a different solution, I hope to have everything ready to re-hang the swing in a different location for him on the day the tree falls cause he’s just too young to understand that sometimes that happens. I’d really like to be able to show him immediately that we can fix problems like that if we just think ahead a little bit, and sometimes we can make things better than they ever were before. And that’ll be the case when that tree falls. I’ll be able to set up a better swing location using a different method.

But back to the flooding thing, one of the reasons we need to be prepared to handle emergencies like this that happen all the time is that some of your friends, neighbors or family might need you during that kind of situation, and that’s the time you want to be a help and not in need of help also. My wife’s brother and sister-in-law also live on a lake, but a different one than us, and their house is flooded. They got most of the appliances put up on blocks, and all their stuff moved up into their attic to hopefully avoid most of the damage, but their new flooring is ruined. Man, he bought a little bit of that flooring paycheck to paycheck to get it done before they got married, they don’t have a lot, and he’s put hundreds of hours into an old house to fix it up for his new bride and in one weather event, almost took it all away. We’ll be able to help them with labor to get it put back together. But I just want you to realize that sometimes these things come suddenly and can quickly get very dangerous. So be wary, watchful, not fearful, but prepare for the worst, and hope for the best is what I always say.

One more thing, think about where you’ll go, and how you’ll get there if flood waters start to rise in your area, find out if you are in a flood zone! One of the things I was worried about was how high could the water get before our house was in danger of flooding, so I even went out to check the dam to see how it was holding up. Part of me hoped the dam would breach before flooding our house, but another part of me felt selfish for thinking that because it would have meant more danger for people downstream of us. How high did the water get? Man, this story got a little long… 🙂 Did the water reach our house? Did the dam break? What happened to all the garden planting we did right before it started raining? Tune in next week for the rest of the story.

Until next week
I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”