Day 365

We like to joke that living here is our version of paradise 364 days out of the year, but that 365th is a real doozy. August 4th was day 365 for us. Hurricane Isaias came rolling through and put the Schuylkill river about 6 1/2 feet over the bank. For those who don’t live in the Philadelphia area, it’s pronounced Skookull.

There’s a 4ft fence in this picture. And this is not the high water mark.

This is not a poor us blog post. We live here with full expectations that water is occasionally going to come over the bank. And we live here on purpose. So feel free to believe that we are slightly nuts but without one ounce of pity for our self-inflicted situation. One of the things we feel that’s important is to highlight both things that worked really well and things that didn’t work quite as expected, there’s learning in both situations.

Prepped for a 16ft flood height.

We had plenty of warning for the flood. And based on the forecast, the river was supposed to get to 15 ft elevation. The river will crest our bank at 14 ft, 15ft it’s about 6 inches up our garage wall and out to the street. Right around 15 ft, the water coming in from the river meets the water draining down onto the street from higher elevations and anything over that point escalates our situation rapidly. So 16 ft puts water up between a foot and a half and 2 feet up the garage wall. So the log splitter is on a hoist, mulch destined for the garden, and some pieces of wood that we use to store the docks in the winter were staged on a table. Patchy’s truck held the trash bins, floor jack, and some other random stuff. Everything else goes up on the garage platform. It takes us about an hour to get everything ready. Leaving time to go assist the neighbors.

Meg doing her best impression of a drowned rat while helping the neighbors.

This is not an issue. We prepare for this.

Shortly before we took this picture we got a call from the neighbor telling us that the forecast had just jumped to 18 ft. Patchy moved his truck to the emergency parking lot and walked home. And I started watching the water rise quickly. . . .and realized that we forgot to remove the garage door opener sensors. I was able to get a few of them off and moved up before they were submerged. That goes on the written prep list for next time.

We were apparently less prepared for this.

Remember that boat planter?

The rest of the day involved several trips out into the yard to rescue fence gates that had floated off their hinges, tie off that stack of wood that we showed you in our first blog, move all of those bags of mulch that were on the table, and to help support the floating bees.

This was a physics bee-tastrophe waiting to happen.

I feel like I owe an apology to my physics teachers for this situation. I know better. Force, moment arms, axis of rotation, etc. So Mr. Pitt and Mr. Nalence, I truly am sorry. I also feel like I owe an apology to the Bosun of the USS Ft. McHenry who gave me the worst ass chewing I’ve ever received in my entire life and gave me a lifetime of practical application in how to load a ship and gripe things down.

To put this ass chewing in perspective, the USS Ft McHenry is 610 feet long. In July 1998, 2ndLt Meg was supposed to have everything staged on the pier for loading on the Fort Mac when the ship pulled into port. And I did. Until the sailor who owned the pier showed up that morning for my first yelling of the day. It made no difference that we had coordinated to be allowed to stage our gear ahead of time. He wanted everything off of his damn pier yesterday. So we started the forklifts back up and started moving containers and pallets back down to the end of the pier. By the time the Fort Mac showed up about half of everything had been moved and we looked like a soup sandwich. The Bosun was standing on the helo deck in the aft of the ship and I heard him yelling at me the entire time the ship was pulling into port. All 610 feet of it. 610 feet of a reaming by a man who had joined the Navy the year I was born. Thankfully that was the low point of our working relationship.

Given the lack of gripes in the above picture, the fact that the floats are too narrow to balance the load, and that we’re pulling midline on those boxes to try and balance the bee dock, I’m probably due for another one of those. Because I really do know better. Needless to say, about an hour after this picture and another 2 feet of water under those floats, the box with the horizontal strap around it it cut loose and I watched bee hives dump into the water.

Exhausted and tired of being wet.

After moving the bags of mulch up and tying off the wood that we use to stow the dock in the winter there wasn’t anything left to do but watch the water rise and hope that it didn’t come up over the platforms. Thankfully, it didn’t rise much further than the picture and stopped about 6 inches below the platform. Final height 20.55 feet.

Some days we win. Those bees were a real loss. Needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot of buzzing around The Hive that day. We continue to learn the longer we live here and there are always opportunities to do things better the next time.

What do you think? Have you ever received a butt chewing from over 600 feet away? Have you ever experienced a real life physics issue that you should have foreseen?