Locust Fork River Flood - January, 2009

I think our drought is over if the pictures indicate anything. (Click on the pictures to see a larger size with more detail.) One picture shows the flood, and the other shows the same area after the water drained away. Actually, the water drained away in just a couple of days, but I didn't get down there to take a picture until days later. I had intended to post this a week ago, but got distracted and forgot about it. We had over 7" of rain in less than three days at one point. The pictures show the one-lane gravel road that goes in front of my house. This is the end of the road that goes nowhere and ends up just fading away into the woods, so this is not the part of the road that we need to take to get out. At this point it is a steep grade going down, so it is quite deep even as the road disappears into the flood, which spread out into a literal lake. I think that it must have been at least ten feet or more deep at the deepest point. Fortunately, it completely drained away in just a couple of days, but the "low water bridge" was under water for a couple of weeks, so my husband had to take an alternate route to and from work. He noticed a couple of days ago that the barricade is down, so he says he will check it tomorrow morning to see if the waters have abated enough for the "low water bridge" to be passable.

We were not able to go to Church on Nativity because of the tornado and flash flood watches going on at the time. We seriously debated whether to go or not, but decided that two women (my daughter and I), one of which has a broken arm and neither of whom sees well after dark especially with rain reflections all over the place, and a three year old traveling at night for 45 minutes in good weather over back roads that are narrow and very curvy was not a good idea. It appears that we made the right choice because we later heard that there was a mud slide complete with boulders blocking one road, and at another place a bridge was washed out with water rushing over the road. What a night Jan 6/Dec 24 was! Now this week we are having record cold weather, and I'm quite tired of it already.