Thank You Ike!

Here is what we woke up to in our backyard, courtesy of Ike.

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Here is my pathetic map to explain what happened and what should have happened:

The blue is the creek in its normal route. Our neighbors basically have a moat around them. The green line shows the drain pipe that goes under their driveway. The red line shows the drain pipe that USED to go under our road. Our builder had to hire an engineer to draw up plans for pushing our road through (it used to be a dead end) and for rerouting the creek (which used to run right through our property). When that happened, the county made Ray (our builder) remove the pipe from under the road. (Idiots!) The black arrows show the path that the creek ended up taking with the downpour that we had last night. The black "X" shows where the creek was kind of blocked - it was flowing a bit, but not like it should have. Where the creek turns to go under our neighbor's driveway (green line) is where the problem was. The one drainage pipe wasn't nearly enough, so the water just washed out the road.

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This creek is actually lined with large white rocks, none of which are visible due to the high water.

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This one is from our front porch. You can see that the water has risen to the neighbor's driveway. It did get into their garage a bit. Thankfully, nothing got into their basement. At one point their driveway was covered, and they were completely surrounded by water.

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Here's where the "traffic jam" took place, and then washed out the road.

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Our builder was here almost immediately when called. Thankfully, he is building another house on our street and all of his equipment is on site. He scooped out the back corner so it would flow better (black "X") then dug a 2 foot deep trench across our road (hmm . . . didn't we have drainage there before?) That took care of the problem very quickly. I was shocked at how fast the water went down.

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As you can imagine, Ray will have a few choice word for our county officials, as well as the engineer (who was paid $4000 for his wonderful plans!) As of now, we still have that trench, and Ray's scoop is still sitting there!