Water, Water Everywhere

I talked a while back about the water on Pine Ridge Farm. We've been having trouble these past two years with standing water. Remember when I blogged about it? This morning when we woke up, John was nice enough to head out and feed the bottle babies. When he came in, he said, "We have more water on the ground now than we ever have."

After church, he and Mary headed out to see what they could do. They started, sensibly enough, at the pond. It was pretty obvious that the pond level was rising, and that it wasn't going down. Our pond, while man-made, is spring-fed, and, at the end opposite the spring, it has an outlet. The outlet feeds into the culvert over which our driveway runs. Not today, though. No water was moving. They followed the pipe out to the road, found the end, and began digging. It turns out that someone had covered the outlet with a grating. That grating was clogged with debris. By this time, Jay had stopped by and helped John clean out the debris. About 2pm, they came in for coffee. They explained that the pressure from the water draining from the pond was forcing that water through the now-free-running outlet at such speed that a small geyser had formed at the end of the driveway.

By 6pm, the level of the pond had gone down 3". John estimates that 28,000 gallons of water had flowed through that outlet in the 4 hours between measurements.

The estimate for the drain work we wanted done to solve this was "around $1800." Given that the outlet still would have been clogged, would the drain work have helped? I'm skeptical. So John saved us the money and the water is leaving. We have hope of a dry property in the near future!

Just hope, though. It's supposed to rain from tonight until Thursday....