Spring Flooding

[shareneh]

Here in North Dakota we are sitting on about ten feet of snow in our yards. We expect to have heavy flooding when the snow melts in the spring.

We are expecting the lake to come up three feet or more this spring, causing flooding in a vast majority of our area.

What are your methods for preventing flooding in your areas? I am mostly worried about the animals and the basement/foundation of the homes and buildings.

We plan on moving the snow away from the house and coop. but we will still be sitting in slush for the first month or so of the warm up.

We have had such a hard winter here. Snowfall almost every day for six weeks. I love winter and the snow but now I am getting worried about the thaw.

 

[patandchickens]

We are on a low spot in the landscape (not along a watercourse, well ok not 11 1/2 months of the year <g>, but we get pretty good overland flooding) and we take spring flooding pretty seriously here. The situation may be a bit different from yours -- more of a low spot in landscape, but less snow (ten feet! wow. Most we ever have standing around is 2' or so, although that's usually wind-packed, with drifts no higher than 3-4' except along buildings etc).

First defense is the ditches. I've enlarged our ditch system considerably since we moved here -- I can't imagine why nobody else did first, tho of course that could account for why previous owners tended not to live here for very long . Special attention is paid to the outlet of water where it goes into the next door neighbor's front hayfield, on the theory that the more and faster it goes out, the less backs up to flood the house or barn. I've removed the culvert going under the barn driveway so it's now an open ditch (tho this poses some summertime problems and I'm still looking for an AFFORDABLE better solution) because otherwise the culvert fills with water in a Jan thaw, then freezes solid still full of water, then isn't a culvert anymore. Whereas a ditch is always a ditch. This spring I'm going to either rip out the kennel driveway's culvert as well, or more likely add a second one next to it.

Whenever a thaw is threatened, we go out and shovel the ditches. Sigh. Just the major ditches usually, until the thaw actually gets rolling. For a serious thaw we will also break out the ice from them, when possible (it isn't always). During the thaw I spend between three and ten hours a day tending the ditches to encourage maximal throughput and exit into hayfield. It's good exercise. Fortunately I *like* standing out there in waders poking at ditches with a shovel and swearing at thick ice. We've found that removing the snow and ice BEFORE the thaw makes a HUGE difference in how much the water backs up, or doesn't.

The basement sump pump (which fires every 6 minutes or so during maximal wetness) has a backup system so that if the power goes out the battery backup kicks in automatically. If power were out for more than a day or day and a half, we'd swap in a car battery for further service.

The barn, cleverly built (not by us) with the floor about 10" below surrounding ground level <growl>, has two sumps and pumps. Unfortunately they do not have battery backup (way too expensive) so if power went out during a floody thaw the barn would just flood, period, whatcha gonna do. Which has happened (before I dug the second sump and instituted some other measures like replacing leaky gutters, shovelling drifts away from south wall of barn, and putting in cement barriers to slow the inflow of surface melt). Fortunately by spring-thaw time, we don't have TOO much hay left in the barn, and to some extent it can be carried to the highest end of the barn and stacked on multiple pallets. Then, after flooding is over, stored OUTSIDE under a tarp b/c in a soaked barn it will just mold anyway.

Basically anything you can do to encourage/expedite the flow of water away from the house/barn, the better. Clear paths thru the snow wherever the water will naturally want to flow. Water flows MUCH more slowly through a 'sponge' of saturated snow than thru a cleared ditch. If you expect emergencies sometimes it is good to own a gas-powered pump of reasonably high capacity (and have a supply of stabilized gas on hand of course to run it!). I *suspect* some previous owners of this house may have taken that approach, only b/c otherwise I can't see how they would not have been totally, totally screwed.

And pallets are good to have around, to store things up above the flood. You can even use them in the chicken coop, with plywood or carpeting or whatever on top, to keep the chickens abovewater.

Good luck, sounds like you're in a much tougher situation than we are and I am really REALLY not looking forward to this years' thaw...

Pat

 

[Wifezilla]

When I lived in Wisconsin, my dad would make me and my brother go dig channels in the snow so when it melted, the runoff would go in to the street instead of our basement.

 

[shareneh]

Thanks for the info, pat and wifezilla. I will keep this in mind. I am crossing my fiingers so we don't end up with damage to the buildings.