John wanted some more details of the recent deluge, so here’s some more results of last weeks storm (click the pictures for larger views)

These 2 pictures show the seasonal creek that flows into the pond behind our house. In normal high water, the channel is about 18″ wide, and normally much lower. The beaten-down grass show the 3-4′ wide swath that the water made after the storm, and the remains of some straw bales I had set there a few years back to capture sediment from the ripping/keyline project. (Looking at that post, I realize I never posted more pictures….add it to the to-do list)

The straw bales look like someone walked through with a chainsaw and carved them out of the way…good thing they are no longer needed for that purpose.

Several years ago, we installed a culvert to replace the one that had blown out in the 96 floods, before we arrived here. In order to protect the outfall area, we placed hundreds of pounds of broken concrete as a splash apron to absorb the water’s energy. Here you can see that the water shoved most of that concrete about 3′ downstream, exposing the geotextile fabric that we had placed to hold the soil in place beneath the concrete. Looks like I’ve got some concrete moving to do, and perhaps some staking of the site with rebar to hold it all in place.