Situation Update

 

We're back to Situation Mostly Normal now. The three weeks solid of rain have finally taken a break. It was gloriously sunny out yesterday. We're cleaning up from the garage flood, which is a lot of bleah work I won't bore you with, but the drier days will help out. The slide on our road hasn't budged, and the trees have gotten trimmed back from the power lines in more than a few places.

Our power finally got restored on Sunday night, so we ran around and did chores like laundry, running the dishwasher, and vacuuming with All Of The Lights On. One of the very rare occasions I was happy to do chores. We also got to turn the lights on our tree back on. 

It was a long nearly two weeks (12 days) of no power, which meant we didn't plug in the tree. It made me sad to have it sitting there all decorated but dark.

It's really really nice to have our tree lit up again. Thankfully, it's still very green even with the use of the wood stove keeping us warm during the power outage so it can stay up a little while longer. 

The Situation

 

So here's a pictorial adventure of our Situation. Over December (19")and January to date (17") we have had a total 36" of rain, That's too much for most mountainside communities. That's a normal amount for an entire rain year. For us personally, all that rain has meant that on our road we have a mudslide.

This is how it looked after our neighbor with a tractor and front scooper cleaned up the slide including downed dead trees. We are lucky that it only partially blocked our small road. And that he had to get to work.

Some organisms are quite happy with all the excess moisture.

There are mushrooms all over the place.

I don't know the names of these, just admiring them from afar, and certainly not foraging and taking the risk of eating them.

Further up the road, we come to the main issue, the reason we've been out of power continuously since 1/4. Trees came down and hit the power lines, snapping them off the power pole. Small dog for scale.

This is on the other side of the crossed trees over the road. You can see the power line coming down diagonally toward the pavement.

The line is being pulled out of the road by the red caution tape so that one car can just pass by.

You can see a small red diagonal line, that's the red caution tape holding back the power line. We've been assured that it's not live, but you never know, especially when they're working on getting the power back on.

The rest of the mountain we live on has had their power restored, but we have not. I guess because it affects so few people on our small road we got prioritized down lower on the list. Understandable, but still very frustrating. We're lucky to have the Powerwalls and a great generator (and lots of extension cords), but it's getting very very old. And still the rain keeps coming.

Rain Again

We've had this cool weather station set up since April this year, it was our anniversary present to ourselves. And it hadn't gotten much of a workout besides telling us how darn hot it was this year. But this past weekend, we found out it has an actual sense of humor. "It's raining cats n dogs." Indeed.

There was a lot of rain forecasted, the media is using new terms like atmospheric river, and bomb cyclone. But it turned out to just be a rain storm "just like we used to have." We've missed having rainstorms like this, really and truly, it was just part of life and part of the fun of living in the mountains. A bit of an adventure or whatever. But now, there's the worry of the steep mountainsides that burned in the fire coming down in a debris flow with too much rain at once. That means evacuation orders or warnings for a lot of people in our town. Not us, thankfully, as our home is on the other side of the highway and river. 

We did all the usual things to prepare, put away the outdoor cushions, took down the sun shades we put up for the summer, tarped up equipment, cut some firewood, cleared our drainage ditches, that sort of thing. Then we hunkered down inside, nice and cozy and hoped for the best. We expected to lose power, but we only did very briefly. Our neighbors down the street are out though, they are on a different power transmission line that we are. 

It's fun having the weather station, our total for the storm of 7.47" was a little less than some of the other measurements in our town that I've seen, but I think the spot where our station is located is a bit protected from rain (and wind too).  It's remarkable to me that on October 3rd, it was 100F, and we hadn't had any rain at all since April 25th. It's been a long, hot, dry summer, and all this rain is so very welcome.

As I woke up this morning, it was absolutely pouring, at an inch an hour rate according to the weather station. And then it stopped as the sun rose higher. Then this was the view out our front door. Pshew, we made it. No big slides happened, our power stayed on (?!?), and the roads are mostly open. I'm glad that our county is playing it safe and issuing evacuation orders, just in case, but it's going to get old for the people affected, especially as they aren't providing vouchers for housing like they did during the fire evacuation. We had a bad slide back in 1982, and ten people were buried in their homes in mud. And that was without a burn scar on steep hillsides, just an epic amount of rain. I expect that if we continue to have normal rainstorms, the just-in-case evacuations will continue.

Enough about the weather, back to getting some sewing done!

Hold the Mud, Thanks

 

We got almost 2" of rain over the weekend. But most importantly, not all at once or too fast. We're very worried about a new thing around here now: debris flow after the fire. Our mountains are very very steep and the soil may not stay in place after everything that's gotten burned.  A lot of the plants and trees are integral to holding the hillsides in place. 

We happen to be on the "safe" side of the highway/river so thankfully we're not impacted. But we're still worried about our community. There are warning signs up all over the entrances to town, and the local authorities have been working really hard to contact everyone and have people be prepared to flee. They're worried about a Santa Barbara style catastrophe happening here. We get a whole lot more rain than Santa Barbara ever does, and we sometimes get incredibly intense rainstorms. 

 Welcoming the return of the rain is of course, still an annual thing, the continued survival of the forest and our community is depending on it being a gentle rain season for this year and probably the next several years. We're hoping for the same amount of rain as usual so that the forest gets what it needs, but having the rain arrive spread out evenly over the months instead of concentrated into a few weeks. I'm

Seriously?

It rained.
In the middle of May.
This broke all the records.
Not a thing that normally happens.
Two whole inches just overnight.
Hail and more rain the next day too.
Wind so hard the sun umbrella got tossed off the deck down into the garden.
It smashed into the pomegranate, rhubarb and iris.
All the roses and irises were blooming.
Now that's all mush.
Everything is leafed-out and bending with the weight of the unexpected rain.
What is this going to mean for the fire season?
Now we'll have to do all the weed-whacking Again.

Big Muddy

 The "Big Muddy" is finally back again, it's been a while since the drought has been going on for years. That's what we've always called the river near where we live in Boulder Creek during big rainstorms. The river's real name is the San Lorenzo river. It eventually flows all the way down to meet the Pacific in Santa Cruz.

 There's usually a nice wide beach there at the bottom of these stairs. During the summer this is a good place for wading and to watch the ducks. The river is wide and slow here at this bend, but not when we get so much rain all at once. This was taken on a day where we'd gotten about 5"of rain overnight.

 During big storms we always have to go for a walk on the bridge to check out how high the river level has gotten up to (our version of disaster-mongering.) Usually you'd see concrete flood gate barriers where that line in the river is. But when the river rises they pretty much disappear. Years ago, before all the trouble with salmon die-off they used to block the river here during summer time to make a nice swimming hole for everyone to enjoy.

After the storms, the morning was misty and beautiful. Unfortunately that didn't hold for long, we had several more storms come through over the next few days. My unofficial rain totals for the week was around 15"!

Rainy Flowers

 More post-rain, momentarily-sunny spring-is-finally-sprung pictures.

 That one big drop of water turning the colors because of the reflection really caught my eye.

 Irises can hold a surprising amount of rain.

All the raindrops and their shadows just sitting on top of a tulip leaf.

 The red of the tulip caught in the raindrops surprised me when I saw this photo.  It wasn't something I saw when I was taking the picture.

Totally Tulips

 A I'm-Happy-It's-Spring post!  Here have a whole bunch of sunny day after rain tulips.

Capturing Raindrops

Trying to capture the raindrops.Before they fall.And get my camera wet.