Rain's A Comin' (Time To Make A Mess)

Couple weeks ago I posted about flooding here in Louisville, now it's starting to look like I'll get some fresh flooding to shoot soon. They're predicting 1 to 3 inches of rain will fall today and by Friday see a total of up to 5 inches fall.

While I'm more than a little bit excited about the possibility of indulging in a little flood photography, that is not what this post is about. It takes some time after the rain starts falling for the river to get up (it's still 5 feet below flood stage presently), but in the meantime there's localized flooding to keep me busy. Namely in my basement. Well, not this time but in torrential downpours past it would be doing a sorry imitation of a cistern.

As you can see from the photo below, the property slopes downhill towards the front. One would think that would be a good thing but someone had the bright idea to put doors in the basement wall and slope a driveway down to that, in the opposite direction from the slope of the rest of the land. Net result is much of the water gets channeled into the driveway and down into the basement. There's a drain at the bottom of the driveway but it gets overwhelmed and clogged with debris anytime a proper gullywasher rolls through.

Growing up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, a good gullywasher rolling in meant it was ditchin' time. You grabbed a mattock and hoe (or similar implements of destruction) and went out and tried to channel the water so's everything didn't wash away. Even though this is city water I'm pretty sure it's just as lazy as the sort I grew up with, so I decided to see if my hillbilly engineering skills could be of some use.

Water is lazy, always taking the path of least resistance. All you have to do to make water go where you want is make where you want it to go be the path of least resistance. That mostly consists of digging out the high spots and building up the low spots.

Here the land channels the water through the gate and from there it runs to the left down to the driveway and basement. To stop that I had to raise the left side and lower the right side. Half the fun of ditchin' is improvising solutions with materials on hand. First I dug a trench from where water typically starts to pond just inside the gate down and to the right, away from the driveway. To raise the left side I scrounged up some limbs that were an inch or two in diameter and roughly a foot long and half embedded them into the ground starting at the left side of the gate before curving around the meet the trench. Next I packed dirt excavated from the trench into the water/uphill facing side of the limbs and then for good measure packed a little on the other side to make sure they weren't going to migrate.

Finally, I covered the packed dirt with wood chips/mulch so that it wouldn't immediately wash away and then packed those down. After making sure that there was clearance for the gate and double checking the trench for obstructions all that was left was to scratch out a couple channels further uphill to minimize erosion and make sure all that water was going to wind up at the gate. Well, and wait for the rain.

Rain didn't keep me waiting for long, I was working on this yesterday afternoon and it started storming a bit before midnight. This morning I had to go out and check on the results of my handiwork.

I'm always half afraid that I've managed to overlook something that will screw it all up but that was not the case with this.

A little water was still going to the left but not anything the drain couldn't handle, most was going in the trench and away from the driveway.

While this may not be the prettiest solution, it'll do nicely for the time being. Once things are a bit less muddy I'll have to see about implementing something a little more permanent, probably along the lines of a French drain.

We've got more rain coming throughout the week, it'll be interesting to see if it continues to hold up. I'll try and update this if anything changes. Until next time, y'all stay dry!

See! No flooding!