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| The flood of 2010 that tried to take out Ellison Lane. That's me on the old John Deere 4310. |
Hard rain all night has filled the ponds and swales, so the overflow to the stream is now flowing. As soon as the stream level goes down a bit, I'll start up the hydraulic ram and fill up the storage tanks near the shop/greenhouse. The stream is in flood stage, but is staying within its bounds.
It was in 2010, I think, that we had the first of a series of floods here in our neighborhood. Ron, from the end of Alaska Place, came out with his tractor to help us clear the culvert under the road before it washed out. Eric had to close up his culvert to keep his shop from further flooding, which put the water onto Ellison Lane. We had to work quickly to cut a new ditch along the lane and redirect the water down the brushy slope toward the pond. Ellison Lane was severely rutted, but still usable.
Eric's shop survived the flood and went on to provide an important service to this part of the island: keeping tools and equipment running when new items became too expensive and a trip to a repair shop in Friday Harbor was just too much trouble.
A few things have happened since then to help us deal with stormwater and treat it as the valuable resource it is. Eric and I set up a series of checkdams and swales on the slope above the big pond. That slowed down and filtered the water on its way off the property, and got more of it into the soil and not just running on the surface. Eric planted this new landscape with willows, aronias, cattails, and other useful water-loving plants. So now, almost two decades later, this problem area is now very productive, and helps keep Eric's booth at the Farmers Market stocked with choice edibles. He also installed gates in his ditches to control the amount of water running through his orchard and duck pond, so now we just smile and accept the rain where in the past we cursed and grabbed our shovels.
And to deal with the source of all that water, the neighbors' land above us, we teamed up and made a series of swales to slow down the surge and made things less "flashy". We got that done by 2012 or so, which is bad timing in a way, because just a couple years later, the new Stormwater District was making grants available for just that kind of work. It took some pretty damaging events to convince the voters to back a new taxing district, but that's how it goes, sometimes.
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