Tuesday January 10, 2017 Guerneville CA.
Another rain storm comes in
It was raining pretty good this morning as another storm is coming in, so I didn’t bother getting up too early as I was up late last night playing computer.
Power goes out and we work on the generator
Around noon I turned on my computer to see what the storms where doing and within ten seconds the power went off.
It wasn’t long before I heard my brother trying to start our generator, so I went out to give him a hand. Turned out we needed to remove the float bowl and clean out the rusty stuff in there. It was starting, but it would die, but now it started up and stayed running so I guess we got it fixed finally. We switched over our houses to it and I went in the house and the power company calls to say the power has been restored.
River’s coming up again
I go out and turn the generator off and set the house back to the power company. Now I can go in and check on what the storms are doing and what flood level they expect the river to get to at Guerneville. It looks like the flood level will be just below what it was yesterday, just below 38 feet. However it’s been raining fairly hard all day, so we’ll see.
A ride in the rain
I had something to eat then I started getting things ready to take a ride up in the hills on the quad runner.
I fastened my shovel to it and started it up.
While it was warming up, I checked the rain bucket gauge to see how many inches we’ve had since these storms started a couple days ago.
I can’t use a five inch rain gauge
Looks almost full, about twelve inches I think, but it was raining too much for me to want to measure it right now, even though it may not look like it in the picture.
I took off on the quad, but it died at the main main gate, so I went back and put some more gas in it, but I think I just didn’t warm it up enough.
This creeks flowing good
I crossed the main road and let myself through another gate and crossed this bridge. This is another creek that goes down the other side of the valley than the one at my house. It’s flowing a lot of water.
Culverts always plug up
I continued on a bit further to this spot that has a big culvert in it. Culverts have a basic problem which is they plug up during big storms.
My feet are still dry so far so I elect not to deal with this one yet. I’ll deal with it on the way back as by that time my feet should be soaking wet as it’s still pouring down rain. Usually, some big sticks get caught in the front bottom of the culvert and that restricts how much water can go through the pipe. The trees have sunk their roots into this crossing so it usually doesn’t wash much.
I did deal with it on the way back and lost my shovel.
I continued on and stopped here to ditch this water off the road so it doesn’t run down it. It wasn’t really causing any destructive problems though.
I stopped at our water tanks to have a look and they were working just fine with lots of spring water going through them.
Turned some valves here
Just behind the water tanks I have a valve network that I can control what spring can flow into our tanks. With all the rains, some of the springs get some clay in them which can make our water a little cloudy, even though it doesn’t hurt anything, so I divert some of them away from the tanks using the valves on the left of the photo. You can see the water I’ve turned away from the tanks squirting out there. That creek just flows like that when it rains hard.
I got my feet wet there a little and with it still pouring down rain, some of it was starting to penetrate a bit but it wasn’t too cold out, so all was good.
I continued on up the hill until I got to this one. The water should cross the road and flow off just below the quad, instead of running down the road. I did some ditching to make it do that and then continued on up the hill.
I was headed to the ridge top where I can overlook the town of Guerneville.
But I ran into this down tree near the top. I was able to move part of it out of the way as it broke up when it fell.
Made it to the overlook of Guerneville
I made it to the overlook of Guerneville. It was still raining hard.
Guerneville was socked in so the pictures weren’t too good, but here’s what it looked like from the overlook.
I headed on down and was going to go down on a different road, but I didn’t get very far when I ran into these downed trees across the road.
So I turned around and went another way as I wanted to go to one more spot to turn another spring out of going to the water tanks.
Waters flowing everywhere
Things are a little fuzzy as it’s just raining so hard under these trees. I walked up to the top of this water were I removed a spring pipe from the main spring pipe so now we are on the main spring and getting plenty of water. The water is slowed down by the road so it’s not doing any damage. All our roads are out sloped so most of the water just goes across them and not down them so there is very little actual damage to the roads. If there was a culvert here, it would of plugged up by now and likely washed the road out and made a lot of pollution.
I headed on down and by now my feet and shoes and pants where pretty much soaked through.
Lost my shovel on this one
I stopped here at this plugged culvert and tried to free up the pipe by pulling sticks out. I got some of them, but there were more of them down deep, deeper than I could reach with my shovel. I got a few of them, but just couldn’t seem to free it up. It’s easier to actually let the water go down and then do it, but I tried anyway.
I noticed there was quite a bit of pressure on the shovel when I put it in the pipe and eventually it got stuck on a stick and the pressure was too much for me to get the shovel out of the pipe. I tried for a bit, but was pooping out fast, so finally I let it go down through the pipe and it was gone. I’ll try to find it when the water goes down.
Ray says the road is flooded to town
Its’ six PM now an still mostly raining hard. I just got an email from Ray who lives down the road. I’d asked him if our main road to town was flooded yet as it does down by his house. He said it’s been flooded for several hours now and the creek water was rising in his backyard which might cause some trouble if the rains didn’t let up soon. It seems like the rains are turning to hard showers right now.
It’s always fun to go out into the rain when it’s raining real hard as long as you have a nice warm place to come back too.
That was my day.