So while you all are going about your business, my neck of the woods is a disaster zone (again) from torrential downpours and flash flooding. My backyard has about 4 inches of standing water:
The Ghost Hollow Viaduct (which used to be where the old trolley ran from Bethany to Wellsburg) on Rt. 67 is washed out and is probably going to cost a pretty penny to fix. This is the reverse angle from the turkey incident:
And then the lowlands along 67 before Buckhannon’s hill is completely flooded and looks like Indonesia after a tsunami:
That is this area. If you look at the 67, I am on the straightway to the left looking down on the farmland.
At any rate, things got so bad that we had to take about 50 buckets of water out of my dad’s koi pond or they would have floated out. Twice. He’s on vacation at the beach and would be devastated if his fish died or went AWOL. We’re rescuing fish from a flood here. Good times.
Patricia Kayden
Rescuing fish from a flood sounds quite adventurous.
Just hearing about Mueller’s indictments of Trump’s Russian buddies. Good times.
TenguPhule
The things you see here at Balloon Juice.
VeniceRiley
Rescuing fish from a flood is a handy metaphor to keep in pocket.
BroD
You’re not going to try and find new homes for the koi are you?
Major Major Major Major
This is why I try to make sure my backyard is just some stairs and a couple potted plants.
Agreed!
mai naem mobile
You need to dig a shallow trench or whatever you call it at the back so that the water drains from your property. Looks like to the left is vacant land.
Mary G
Hope you stay safe, John! Wish we had some of that rain here in California.
TenguPhule
@mai naem mobile:
But who could trust Cole with a shovel?
Aardvark Cheeselog
@TenguPhule: Needs to be new rotating tagline.
Betty Cracker
Thank goodness you’re there to save the fishies, even if your life is starting to resemble the plot of an Amy Tan novel!
bluefish
Rescuing fish from a flood — great song lyric. What a lovely spot you’re in. Just beautiful. Good day today — very good day. And, hey, please don’t lose your footing in those waters. PS — I miss Walter and think of that story often.
Cermet
AS the theory of Corporate induced global warming says, when rain events occur, they will be far more heavy – a minor but annoying aspect to what we will face. Feel lucky – in third world countries the results will be far more deadly.
donnah
Good luck! Tuesday I drove from Charlotte back home to Dayton, via Charleston, WV and the rivers were all really high. And it’s been raining two days solid. Got to be a huge mess there.
Save the fish, save yourself!
ixnay
We live in Maine, on relatively high ground. Juicers may check in if you need to escape -we have room.
trnc
If you have to rescue freakin’ fish from a flood, what the hell kind of chance do we have?
WaterGirl
Cole that needs to be a tagline: we’re rescuing fish from the flood.
No Drought No More
God bless West Virginia, a beautiful part of a beautiful nation.
Today is a banner day in American history.
rikyrah
Be safe, Cole.
And, all your housemates too.
trollhattan
Can you please send those clouds 2,500 miles westward? Thanks!
–California
If you have a home despot or similar in the area, a submersible pond or sump pump and discharge hose will greatly ease the bailing task. Water be heavy!
Good luck.
?BillinGlendaleCA
The farmland, eh? Is that where the mustard is?
opiejeanne
Oh John, all I could think of when I saw your back yard was the garden you were planning.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: Guess he’ll have to go for raised gardens.
MomSense
Yikes. Sorry to hear about the flooding.
raven
Koi float at the Rose Parade.
Starfish
You have lived in WV forever. Are these floods becoming more common? I have seen two mentioned on this blog in the past few years. I don’t recall any being mentioned before that.
WaterGirl
@raven: Fish out of water!
Matt Smith
Mother Nature’s trying to free those koi from captivity, is what’s goin on here.
eclare
@raven: Still can’t get over how beautiful the floats were and the perfect weather you had!
Davebo
I feel for you, really. But 4 inches of water in “parts” of you backyard is livable.
Get back to me when your refrigerator floats out of your upstairs window.
Jay S
@mai naem mobile: That sort of redirection of run off can get a person in serious legal trouble.
kindness
And koi are lousy eating. Carp. There is a reason I never liked Gefilta fish.
ThresherK
@TenguPhule: Yep. I come here for the craziest metaphors made real-life.
@Starfish: Mountain-top removal mining can not be helping this. And I’m sure the people & blogs who geek out over human footprints have details on impermeable surface areas in WV, too.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Might want to brighten up the shadows a bit, otherwise good pic. I’ve actually not seen any pics from this year’s Rose Parade.
Steeplejack
@BroD:
I would take one of the koi, but I don’t think my piranha would like it. He’s very territorial.
debbie
@raven:
Now that’s a float!
Dr. Bloor
Rescuing fish from a flood might be the Cole-est thing ever.
Aleta
@Steeplejack: He’s gotta eat sometime.
No Drought No More
Charles P. Pierce
@CharlesPPierce
“The problem for the WH is that Mueller is a unique combination of nutcutting prosecutor and deft Beltway power player”.
Even worse for The Trumpites (TM), Mueller is also an All-American boy scout. I’ve only known a few myself, none of whom wielded real power. But when the chips are down, its those Americans that carry the ball for us all…
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Way OT: Black Panther is amazing.
That is all.
Mike J
@trollhattan:
In my sailing classes I teach students the old line, “a pint’s a pound the whole world round.” Eight pounds per gallon is incentive to keep the water on the outside of the boat.
J R in WV
@ThresherK:
You’re correct about mountain-top removal mining making flooding much worse. They do force the companies to build catchment basins, which help a lot with minor rainfall events, but when those fill up (or fail suddenly!) it can get much worse very quickly.
But there is no mountain-top removal around Cole’s neighborhood. It’s mostly in the southern third of the state, where I live. Fortunately we aren’t in the coal field, just about 10 miles west and north away from it. We’re in an old Oil and Gas patch instead. Which has its own set of environmental hazards.
Building shipping centers also has a big influence on runoff.
Aleta
The yard in back of me floods every year. It’s shallow, but traveling ducks will land there. If flood currents are raging on the river, they can rest better maybe, and eat stuff. Then it fills with peepers–I don’t know where they are the rest of the time– and the sound at night is nice. Also if the temp drops it will freeze in a night. The ice is very smooth if the air was calm, and we can skate on it.
schrodingers_cat
All the snow is gone, it feels like mud season already.
opiejeanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: We have raised gardens or we’d have no garden at all. At times the ground water is level with the grass. Which currently needs to be mowed. Which is because it’s done nothing but rain for weeks now. So mowing ain’t gonna happen.
We’re getting snow Sunday, which will be a relief but it’s going down to 24! We may lose some of our fruit trees because they thought it was spring because it’s been relatively warm for 6 weeks. The cherries are the most vulnerable.
Aleta
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve come to prefer mud season to blowing dust season. My least favorite.
Yutsano
@opiejeanne: See if you can rent an orchard warmer for the cherry trees. It’s possible a gardening supply store will have something like that available.
schrodingers_cat
@Aleta: Is that the same as blowing pollen and tumbleweed season?
opiejeanne
@Aleta: The property diagonally across the intersection from ours has a long low area that floods and makes a pond if it rains enough and there’s almost always a pair of mallards in the pond, unless it freezes over. I don’t know where they go then . We don’t have storm drains in this neighborhood, we have ditches on either side of the road. There are a pair of mallards floating in a particularly deep spot in the ditch about half a mile up the road from us.
Villago Delenda Est
@No Drought No More:
Donnie and his keystone korrupts are totally outmatched.
opiejeanne
@Yutsano: That’s a good idea. I’ll check tomorrow. We’d need three. two or maybe three. The four trees are not planted in a cluster right by each other, more of a long row with other things in between.
FlyingToaster
@schrodingers_cat: It’ll snow tomorrow night. Because I’m flying out Sunday early morning. GRRRRR.
chris
@Mike J: Word for word because I’ve never forgotten it.
“The best bilge pump is a scared man and a bucket.” Oldtimer on a wharf in BC.
HumboldtBlue
7.5 earthquake south of Mexico City on Pacific ocean.
Aleta
@opiejeanne: I’ve put buckets of water around the trunk. And painter’s drop cloth flung over buds, before the air gets cold. There’s also frost cloth, which is supposed to be better bc in the morning it doesn’t get wet and heavy or heat up.
Big Ole Hound
Meanwhile here in Northern CA we have had no rain in 23 days….and this is our rainy season so looking forward to empty reservoirs again.
trollhattan
@Big Ole Hound:
Yup. We may well make it through February with not one drop. Yikes!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: Sounds like you need some smudge pots.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
We have bulbs coming up, and a couple of days ago I saw a dozen robins in the yard of one of my neighbors. But we also have 5″ of snow predicted for tomorrow. As the biggest snows here in the Philly area always seem to happen late in the season, February or March, I always get a little worried on behalf of the flora and fauna who seem to be over-eager for the warm weather. But I guess they know what they’re doing.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: We got 0.18 inches on Monday.
Origuy
@HumboldtBlue: USGS now says 7.2, onshore 109km WSW of Oaxaca.
Robert Sneddon
@Mike J: “a pint’s a pound the whole world round.”
In America, yes, the rest of the world not so much. Here in the UK (and by osmosis places like India and other parts of the old Empire) a pint is 568mL and 1 pint of water weighs 1.25lb avoirdupois.
Mike J
@Robert Sneddon: I’ll keep it in mind when I go for my RYA certification.
SFBayAreaGal
Please tell the rain to head to California. We need it here.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
On the bright side, you could start a rice paddy.
Jacel
Some years ago I was helping a French translator who was writing French subtitles for English-language TV shows (including Late Show with David Letterman). When part of a clip was still ambiguous to me, she said “I’ll just have to drown the fish.” I wasn’t familiar previously with that idiom (“noyer le poisson” in French).
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Jacel: Still not sure I get it even in light of the current discussion. Is it something along the lines of “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS” (drowning the fish being the latter)?
Jacel
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Yes. If you don’t know exactly what to say, fill the time saying enough to bluff your way through it. Drown the fish.
lowtechcyclist
Why a duck?
LesGS
@Jacel: Had a Chinese co-worker whose take on “Oh, cut me some slack” was “Oh, make me some pants.”
Amir Khalid
@LesGS:
I like this one. I might even venture to use it on occasion.
Betsy
@Jay S: Not in the East. Water is legally considered a “common enemy” and you can take steps to speed its flow off your land, even if that worsens your neighbor’s dealings with it. Not so in the West, where different rules prevail — both because water is a precious resource and due to Spanish law that applied at the time some areas became U.S. territory.
Betsy
@Betsy: or in Cole’s case, take pratfalls to speed its removal …
WaterGirl
@Betsy: Long time, no see.
hafabee
@Mike J: My wife’s Mom taught her a second part, too, which adds some accuracy:
Aleta
Why Buffalo Creek?
schrodingers_cat
@Robert Sneddon: For weights, metric is preferred in India. However English measures of length like feet and miles are still prevalent.