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weather

New and Old

Sunday 07 August 2016

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Slowly, we’re returning to the old within the new. The grandparents were over for lunch yesterday, eating in our new kitchen at our old table a meal that was cooked in our soon-to-be-outdated field kitchen.

Afterward, we had quiet a rain — unlike any we’ve had this summer. The ground was so hard and dry that puddles formed immediately, giving me a chance to walk around the house and see how our filled in trench from our unexpected sewer renovation was draining. A few problems there, but the rain didn’t last quite long enough for those problems to actually materialize (i.e., start to flood the crawl space). Which means we still don’t know how our sump pump works, whether or not it takes care of the problem.

Autumn Sunday

Sunday 18 October 2015

It's during this time of year that the early morning sun is so spectacular. It's not that the leaves are kaleidoscopic for they're all still green here in the South. It's the angle of the sun at this time of year.

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"It's the best time of the year in South Carolina," K always says. Sunny cool days that invite backyard play.

And it's time to begin decorating -- first Halloween. Pumpkin ghosts to hang on our Crepe Myrtles in the front yard.

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Of course, there's always time for the sandbox.

Water

Monday 05 October 2015

The key is to keep things in the proper perspective, as it is with most things in life. We just came out of a mini-drought, with very little rain at all for weeks, and the rain of the last week has replenished our water supply.

As the forecast worsened, I was confident. I'd just redone our basement work space that had flooded twice before, putting heavy-duty waterproof paint on the floor and up to the ground line and sealing the previously-unsealed holes in the concrete that were evidence of some previous owner's battle with termites. We were ready with a pump in case it did flood. I'd redone the draining system, the failure of which had caused the first two floods. We were ready.

Sunday morning, though, we found water in the basement. Not much, but a bit. By the time I had gone back upstairs to change into more appropriate attire and had returned, there was noticeably more water. Significantly more water. I scanned for the source, but it didn't seem to be coming from corner that was the usual source. I soon discovered the breach: one of the termite-poison-injection points had been compromised: water was literally bubbling out of the small hole as if it were a spring. I plugged it with a wine cork and set up the pump, only to discover that the two or so inches of water was not enough to trigger the pump. No fear: we had plenty more water in the crawl space and a shop vac. In the end, I pumped probably seven or eighth hundred or so gallons out of the crawl space at about two hundred gallons out of the work room.

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The nicely-painted floor, though, was a wreck. But the overall damage was minimal, and the situation could have been much worse:

  • We had power.
  • We had a working pump to empty the crawl space.
  • We had a working shop vac to suck up the water that's too shallow for the pump to draw up, which was basically all the water in the basement -- but still.
  • Even if it totally flooded the basement, nothing down there was critical to daily living or irreplaceable.
  • The living area living of our house was highly unlikely ever to flood at all.

By the time we got the basement situation under control, the only real concern was the forest in the backyard. With such saturated ground and such relatively strong winds, everyone was saying that the compromised root systems of trees wouldn't hold indefinitely. But they all held, and we escaped with no damage to speak of.

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Throughout the day, the routine was the same:

  • Grade some papers.
  • Check the water level in the basement.
  • Hang out with the kids a while.
  • Repeat.

We all knew that the situation was worse the closer one got to the shore. When the pictures of the damage started appearing on the Internet, though, it was far beyond anything we'd expected.

So today, we went about our normal routines, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one thankful for the ability to go to work this Monday morning.

Flood 2014

Friday 01 August 2014

The Boy woke up this morning at four. Well, that's what time it was when I finally looked at the clock. We finally got him calmed back down, we were back in bed, and the thought occurred to me: "It's still raining." It had gushed all day, with enough of a deluge in the morning that the drainage creek at the back of our backyard had overrun its banks again. Not nearly as badly as last year, but still a substantial amount of water.

"There goes our mulch," I said, but it miraculously survived.

The basement was another story. It has flooded before, but K and I were hopeful, with all the dry weather we'd been having, that we wouldn't have that problem. At four, I thought, "Better go check the basement."

Probably three inches of water in the storage room. The crawl space was worse.

Lowes opens at six; I was there shortly after six. By around six forty, the newly-purchased pump, which pumps up to twenty-six gallons a minute, was at work.

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Two hours later, it was still sending water gushing out.

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Another hour later, it was a trickle but still going. So if we had an average of ten gallons of water a minute (a very conservative estimate, I think), that would be 600 gallons of water an hour. At three hours, that would be close to two thousand gallons. Is that possible? Two thousand gallons in the crawl space alone? It doesn't seem possible.

But after looking at what happened in Amherstburg, Ontario, I realize how fortunate we were.

Puddles

Saturday 29 June 2013

Take a six-year-old, some puddles, and a pair of gum boots and what do you have? An obsession with every (and I mean every) mud puddle.

Cold, Rainy Day

Thursday 27 June 2013

Who would ever have guessed that in southern Poland, a day in late June could pass without the temperature ever rising above the low fifties? Such a thing has never happened before today, certainly. Who would have thought L would have spent her first day in kindergarten here inside because the teacher judged it was too hot to go outside and she would have spent her last day in kindergarten here inside because the teacher judged it was too cold to go outside?

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I’ve experienced it more times than I care to mention, but every single time I’m here during the summer, the cold catches me off guard. Last visit, K and I really simply forgot about how cold it could get. Perhaps “misjudge” is a better term. We came completely unprepared and had to buy clothes, just as my folks did when they came in 2004 for our wedding. This time, we came during a real Polish heat wave, and I thought, “Well, it looks like we might get through this visit without freezing weather.” Now naive. How silly.

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We came prepared for the cold, but not this cold. So we hunted for something warmer for L (she has a sweater on underneath that sweatshirt) and me.

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Yet a six-year-old cannot stay inside all day. She has to get some of that accumulated energy out. A bike helps; a scooter is in some ways a bit better; a dog that loves to play fetch and then be chased adds more motivation. All three mean a tired girl come bedtime.

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Of course, Babcia was neither surprised nor unprepared. Nor unknowledgable, for that matter: she predicted correctly that, despite the forecast, the morning rain would stop by afternoon.

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Since L and I are planning a trip to Krakow tomorrow, we’re both hopeful that her weather forecast is more accurate than the ever-changing “professional” forecast.

Polish Weather

Wednesday 26 June 2013

My general color association with the sky in this region is gray — a mix of dark gray and light gray, a whole palette of grays. Some days, the sky was a solid, single gray. Other days, there were lower gray clouds with higher clouds of a lighter gray. But no matter what shade of gray, there was one thing in common: the sun was invisible. Hidden. Nonexistent.

For the first few days here, the sky was blue, the sun was out, and I actually found myself thinking from time to time, “Wow, it’s actually almost hot.”

But of course it wasn’t to last. For the last week or so, the gray has returned (with the exception of a couple of hours yesterday morning), the temperatures have dropped: the Polish weather I loathed has finally arrived.

Call Me Noah

Saturday 22 June 2013

What is it with me and flooding downpours lately?

Surveying the Damage

Friday 07 June 2013

We head down to our once-lake-front and take a look at what thousands of gallons of water flowing over a small area in a few minutes can do.

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Mud, sand, limbs, leaves, cans — this is what it looks like after a flood.

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Plants destroyed, swings caked in muck, belongings strewn through neighbors’ yards. I can only imagine what a real flood would be like.

We go out into the neighborhood, checking on what gifts others received, eventually heading over a couple of streets to a house we’d looked at when we were house hunting. It had been love at first sight. The yard was magnificent; the kitchen/dining area was open yet homey, almost cozy, with a fireplace in the corner. The full basement was finished on one half that opened out to a fenced dog run. Yet a friend advised against it: too much cracking in the foundation walls. “It won’t be a problem now,” he said, “but in a few years, it will cost some significant money to fix.”

We were heartbroken.

As we walk through the neighborhood, I remember that on the other side of the dog run was a small creek — a draining stream just like the one that runs behind our house, and so we head over to see. I couldn’t remember how much elevation there was between the drain and the house.

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Not enough.

Talking to neighbors across the street who were out in the yard, we learned that the owners had well over a foot of water in their basement, and that the water had risen to just below the bottom of the window on the outside. I suddenly became very thankful for the two or three inches we found welling up through the slab in our basement.

Flood

Wednesday 05 June 2013

It started around five. I called K to see if she'd need to stay late at work and asked her if it was raining.

"It's coming down pretty hard here," I explained.

And down it came, through dinner, through clean up time, into play time. E and I were by the window when I realized how significant the rainfall really was.

Sheets of rain; gusts of wind. I had these terrible images of one of the enormous trees in the backyard falling onto the house. What would we do? How could I protect my children, my wife?

And still it came down.

Looking into the backyard, I saw we had a lake. And it was growing. Within a few minutes, I realized why: the stream was no longer a stream. And within a few more minutes, we were all standing in the carport in shock.

But it was nothing compared to what I saw when I got to the neighbor's yard. Looking into her neighbor's yard, I saw something that literally made be question my grasp on reality. Water flowing out of the house. Pouring. Torrents running out of the house.

The poor folks were getting it from three directions.

Seeing the owner in the garage, I walked in and asked him if he needed help. I could only imagine what might be going on inside the house, and I thought if I could help him move anything at all to higher ground it would be more useful than standing around with a video camera in my hand.

Fortunately, at that point, nothing had gotten into the house. It was just flowing through his garage, he explained. He'd lived in the neighborhood for close to forty years, he explained, and he'd never seen anything remotely close to this.

I promised to return later to see if the situation had worsened and if he needed help.

It turned out, though, that we had our own issues to deal with.

"Where did the water come from?" K asked. Walls? Floor? Who knows. When this much rain falls in such a short time, the answer is probably, "All of the above."

I vacuumed for at least half an hour before I really felt I was making no progress at all.

"Surely I'm just imagining this," I muttered to myself. "Surely I'm making progress. I've emptied this thing at least ten or twelve times, and it supposedly holds sixteen gallons. That's a lot of water for it to show no change," I continued, still rambling to myself. (The more confused I am, the more likely I am to begin talking aloud to myself. Perhaps I'm not the only one?)

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I decided to take a quick break and see if the water rose any. That would confirm my obvious suspicion that water was still flooding into the house.

By this time, though, the rain had almost stopped and the water was lower, almost returning to the confines of the small creek.

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What remained was a fetid mess.

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An expensive fetid mess: the house, about a half a mile away from our humble home, with a backyard so gloriously landscaped I thought it was a park, no longer had a beautiful garden. In its stead was a lake.

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It was no Katrina. Flash flooding at the most. Still, enough of a view of what water can do to put famous floods into a more meaningful perspective.