We arrived home June 28th about 5 pm, it had started to rain about halfway between Yorkton and Twin Oaks. That was the start of the rain. It rained all day Sunday and Monday and it was raining into an already saturated soil. June had been a wet month.
As many know it has had disastrous consequences.
If you are interested in an arial tour, search Esterhazy Online, then go to Flood Flight. You get a good ideas of the amount of water in the communities around us.
We are thankfully dry and haven't slid down the hill.
We spent the evening of July 4th and Pat all day the 5th at Round Lake helping friends with sand bagging and water management
Saturday the 5th was hot and muggy and we know what that means, storms.
We didn't see any tornados but we got hail. I have never experienced anything like that hail storm in terms of volume, size and the duration of the hail.
There were hails stones at least the size of golf balls. This about a half an hour after the storm and travelling in Pat's hand for awhile.
I was sure they would break the windows in the west side of the house. It broke one of the plexiglass windows in the veranda but no house windows. Our neighbour and Pat's brother weren't so lucky, both had windows broken in their homes.
Worse yet Bruce will be putting in hail damage claims for two fields of canola and one of soybeans.
We had checked out our garden on our return and been admiring our beautiful robust crop of garlic and decided that everything else was doing fairly well considering we had just put the seeds in the ground, then left for a month. You know what's coming, here is our garden after the hail.
Yes, there were plants on the trellises and in the ground! An inconvenience, a disappointment for us but I now have a better understanding of what it might have been like for a family whose food supply of vegetables for the next year had just been beaten into the ground. A better understanding of Grama's 3 year old bags of rhubarb at the bottom of the freezer. I wish I had some.
After the rain had quit we were outside having a look and a walk around. I became aware of the sound of a roaring creek which we normally only hear during spring runoff.
We were certain the beaver dam had been breached.
Nope, the roar was from water coming down a gully on the other side of the ravine.
Runoff does come down the gully in the top picture and the bottom of the ravine does fill in the spring but nothing like this. I don't think it even rained a half an hour, but that storm dropped an incredible volume of water. The next morning the ravine was back to it's meandering summer self and all that water was making it's way to Brandon, MB.
The storm that hit us came down the Qua'pelle Valley. Friends we had helped with sandbagging lost their dike as did many others. They now have water up to the door knobs in their lower level. How long the water will take to subside is anyones guess.
The cliche "the power of nature" does seem to be in order.
The next day Sunday, was a life goes on as usual day for us. Time to start installing the windows in the veranda. We started at 7:00 am and had 5 windows in by 1:00 pm.
Tom came out and helped Pat with the big window in the afternoon and by suppertime we had gone from this
to this. We are so pleased with the windows, particularly the one where the table sits. As we had dinner there that evening there was some discussion about we should have had it a little lower (table height) but it is what it is and it is wonderful to sit in front of that window and feel like you are outside.
Yesterday Pat and I put in 4 more. We have the south side windows and the new door for the west side to do yet.
I am so happy to have those windows in. Pat tells me the bigger job is yet to come, the siding, but I tell myself that it is something we can work a little at a time and siding isn't nearly as heavy as windows.
Till next time, enjoy summer.
