Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Sooo...Houston, We've Got a Problem.

When your farmhouse was built in the 18-somethings, people back then planned ahead. They knew that things would leak, and that in the spring, floods might just happen. Just like the running of maple sap, every single spring. They planned ahead, and made ways for water to get out once it got in (aka dirt floors). Then came modern fasinations like electricity and oil heat, and then things went a little awry. Here in Maine, for those of you who don't live nearby or listen to the news, we've had a heck of a noreaster and more than a bit of flooding.

Sidenote...We up on the hills are lucky, as what comes in will end up going out. Folks on the coast got blasted with spring-high tides, easterly wind, and 25 foot seas. These pics are just a bit south of Portland. The bird that looks an awful lot like a bald eagle can't be a bald eagle as no eagle would be quite this dumb. But it sure looks like one!
This poor house? There are more than several that are in similar states of washed-away-ness. Entire seawalls washed out to sea. Boats sunk, roads are gone. And this is Maine, where they generally try to do a decent job of hurricane-proofing to start with. It must have been REALLY bad on the coast.
Inland a bit more, we got this...('xcuese the pj's, I just woke up)
This is at @10am, and the water was around 6 inches or so...a little higher than we've had since Mr. VT and I moved in.
By 12:30, we were to here...(to compare, look at that wierd blue pump-thing)
And it kept going. We didn't have power (no surprise) and by the time our best-housemate-in-the-world was able to wrangle a generator from Home Depot and we set it up (thank god for the quick guide that came with it), the shallows that you see in the pictures were at 9.75 inches, and the deep end around the corner was up to 11.75 inches.
Unbelievable, we didn't loose anything! The furnace seems to be okay, we didn't have anything stored down there other than the wine and beer-making supplies, lots of bottles, and our beer/wine collection, the latter I saved about 1/4 an inch from the floodwater breaching the corks!! We got really lucky.
So we had a storm party, cranked up the wood stove, plugged into the generator, called friends, and ate woodstove slow-roasted lamb and veggies, homemade bread I baked up the day before, and we all stayed up way too late drinking and laughing about how crazy this storm was.
We are now warm, dry, three days behind on schoolwork (we couldn't quite justify plugging in the laptops or internet router to the generator), and VERY ready for summer.

2 Comments:

Blogger Bezzie said...

Wow, suddenly I feel really good about my soaked closet. ;-)

4:48 PM  
Blogger Rain said...

Nooooooo, not the wine and beer!

Hope it wasn't too awful to clean up.

6:12 AM  

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