Flood Watch 2009

Welcome to the Red River Valley,   the lay of the land is basically flat……..I mean really flat…………in the Winter here all the snow sticks around cause its not warm enough to melt.     Come Springtime when the temperatures warm, the snow melts resulting in water wanting to be in some other place then where it fell as snow.       I live just off the river where it meets with a creek, surrounded by low lands on three sides of me so I get basically surrounded by water (I have lakefront property for 2 weeks every year).       I don’t have raging water like you see in other places…………I have backup of the water in the low lying areas.    Some years, like 1997, we have major problems with the volume of water.   We are not expecting that much water this year, which we are very thankful for.

 

So the water is starting to rise around out place. 

We are just starting to see the water rise on the road that takes us to town.  By tomorrow it will be under water….we’ll have to take the long way to town.  As I said, the water doesn’t move thru here, it just backs up.     I probably have the boring part of the flood.

 

 

 

 

 

The river that causes the problems is the Red River of the North (not to be confused by the river in Texas by the same name).      Most rivers in the Northern Hemisphere flow North to South…….This particular river flows South to North all the way to Hudson Bay in Canada.      What causes most of the problem is that it warms up in the South and snow melts but further North it doesn’t get as warm until later, so we have water wanting to move North where its still frozen, so there creates the problem.   So now we wait for the water to move our way and then North to its final desitnation.

 

 

Here’s looking out my second story family room, as you can see the low lands are filling in, eventually at the height of the high water, it will be all covered.

 

Where our farmstead sits, its high ground, so we shouldn’t have any problems here…….unless we were to get a bunch of rain……….then we might have some issues.

 

We’ll keep you posted how things are going.

 

later……….

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