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High Water Mark

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Enjoy the end of September, Babooners.

Northern Minnesota will see the peak of fall color over the next few days. The DNR has a nifty website that can keep you up to date on the progress of autumnal glory.

Southern Minnesota will spend the weekend bailing out from last Thursday’s record setting rain. If I had a radio station to play with, I would offer at least two high water songs to inspire the bucket brigade. Were there an officially sanctioned flood music genre, these would be its classics.

Randy Newman playing Louisiana 1927 in Germany.

Johnny Cash doing Five Feet High and Rising in Los Angeles in 1959.

Two famous songs about real floods sung by their authors. Our recent deluge probably isn’t extensive enough to add a tune to the flood song cascade, unless someone comes up with an irresistible, watery rhyme for “Owatonna“.

Have you ever had to do battle with floodwaters?

69 thoughts on “High Water Mark”

  1. good morning, All – we’re high and sandy – no flooding, but we didn’t get nearly the amt. of rain that you poor ‘booners got to the south. hope you are ok.
    if anyone does a poem about flooding in Owatonna, i would think it would need to include our Donna and flora/fauna.
    keep your heads above water, please

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  2. feels like were in the congo bwanna
    never have.
    i’ve been to yellowstone the week after the waters receded
    ive driven through the minnesota river up over the roads near my house.
    i live in a spot where the river did come up over the raod this spring but it wasn’t much of a battle. i just went the other way
    i was out one night 25 years ago when it rained 14 inches in a couple hours and the car were getting swept away from in fornt of me driving down the raod. i parked on high ground and swm hme til the water receded the next day.
    all minor battles
    september in old owatonna
    you can go swimming if you wanna
    barb say enjoy flora and fauna
    i say watch out for piranha

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    1. That was actually 23 years ago – it was summer of ’87 – I was in a car too, driving on Shepard Road. The rain started coming down so heavily I wondered if I had managed to accidentally drive under a waterfall. Couldn’t see, slowed to a crawl, finally pulled over to what I guessed might be the side of the road, but I couldn’t find a guardrail or anything. I might have just stopped in the middle of the road, for all I could tell. I sat there for awhile, hoping that if any cars came up behind me, they would see the taillights in time to stop. No cars came, though, and fortunately there was a river nearby that the rainwater could drain to, and I stayed dry.

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    2. I was out with college friends in Uptown having a pre-wedding celebration for one of our gang during that rain. It rained enough that it cut off power to the restaurant we were at – so out we had to go into the rain (in an odd twist, for safety’s sake they said they couldn’t let us stay when there wasn’t power…). We attempted to head out for one of the friend’s houses, but I turned back when I hit water up over my doors at an intersection. Wedding went off two days later without a hitch.

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  3. Nice, Tim.

    I’ve lived on high ground. No floods.

    My favorite flood song is from the Big Top Chautauqua show “Riding the Wind.” That’s a tent show that offers a wide variety of entertainment on summer evenings up on a ski hill between Bayfield and Washburn, WI. Wonderful theatrical experience!

    Keep your pink butts dry, Baboons, and have a cozy weekend.

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  4. hey i am loving the glass castle
    the book club is coming up sometime soon. we sould begin tweeking the details so i stand a chance of making the meeting this time

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    2. I am enjoying the book too – it has that fascinating “train wreck” quality…

      I will try to call Sherrilee this weekend. I have uncovered her phone number. Regardless of whether she can host, I’m fretting about her. (I come from a long line of fretters.) And yes, 10/3 is the date.

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  5. Rise and Drip ‘booners:

    Fortunately, I have never had to battle the floodwaters. However, last year we had a small but destructive man-made flood in the basement after a part on the refrigerator icemaker/water dispenser failed, sending gallons and gallons of H2O into the basement. I got up in the a.m., and only a bit awake, proceeded downstairs with the dog to put her in the backyard for her morning duties. Water was dripping from the ceiling, flowing down the walls, and sopping our furniture. The scene left me speechless, not to mention wide awake and flooded with adrenaline. 6 weeks of drying fans, insurance company contacts, and contractors followed that flood; then all was well again. It was a real pain, but nothing compared to the floodwaters from rain or a flooded river or lake.

    In the 1987 storm, I was in the Eden Prairie High School at a City Band rehearsal. It was raining buckets, flooding so badly that we were in the High School until 3:00am when the roads cleared enough to drive home. Rain was pouring into the school through the roof and while the tornado sirens blasted away the sprinkler system was on, “watering” the grass.

    Tim, I also have been re-readeing The Glass Castle. It is a favorite of mine. I’m planning to attend the meeting. Anyone else out there?

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    1. Oh, Man… I just can’t imagine being half awake and stepping into water. It’s that kind of adrenaline rush that’ll kill you! Nature or broken water pipe… what a pain…

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  6. Luckily I have not suffered like the poor folks in Pine Island. In graduate school I lived in a questionable apt on the edge of the Bronx. One night at 3 AM there was water cascading into the living room and filling the light fixtures. I ventured upstairs to meet the neighbors. They’d left the bathtub running and a washcloth over the drain.

    Stay dry out there!

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  7. My 1925 bungalow was built, as were all homes in this neighborhood, with rain gutters that drained into a fat pipe that shot the water directly into the storm sewers under the streets. In times of heavy rain, that system got overloaded, causing the water to back up and send tons of raw sewage downriver (sorry about that, Red Wing! better hold your noses, Maiden Rock!).

    The city of Saint Paul devised a simple solution. They came around and cut the connection between gutters and pipes to the sewer, then installed rubber stoppers in the pipes.

    Alas, when it rained hard in virtually every home in this neighborhood the water would run off the roof, pool next to the foundation and ooze into the basement. I’ve had water 10 inches high on my basement floor (and I have hundreds of feet of extension chords under that water!). It used to be that every heavy rain would flood my basement. I’d spend two days with buckets, mops and shop vacs, moving water from the floor to my laundry tubs.

    One day it occurred to me that all those gallons of water I dumped into my laundry tubs were rushing right down a pipe into the city sewers. Which is just what the city meant to avoid. Their solution meant that the water started the same place and ended in the same place, but it did a little detour through my basement before hitting the sewers! As a Democrat, I’m supposed to love Government, but that was one Government policy I found difficult to adore.

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      2. Use the sideways carat (pointy parens) with an “i” first open left carat, then “i” then right carat, type your word and then do the same on the other side with a forward slash ahead of the “i” and you should get italic. Sample HTML tags are in grey below the text editing box.

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    2. Krista: to turn on italics, you type they carat symbol with the i inside, just like it shows below the Reply box (in gray type). To turn it off, you type the same thing but put a backslash in front of the “i.” I can’t type to show you what to do or my typing will go away and turn into italics!!! : -)

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      6. Thanks, Steve!!! 🙂

        Jacque, to do the emoticons, e.g. smiley face, type a colon then a right parenthesis. It looks like a colon and a right parenthesis in the comment box but when you post your comment, it shows up as a smiley face. Use the semicolon for a winky smile.

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      8. OK, at the risk of sounding really dense, I’m apparently missing something.
        another test… and now it is supposted to be in italics?

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    4. Time for a rain garden? This from Wikipedia: “A rain garden is a planted depression that allows rainwater runoff from impervious urban areas like roofs, driveways, walkways, parking lots, and compacted lawn areas the opportunity to be absorbed….” We got to go on a tour of some Mpls ones, they’re really cool.

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      1. Husband is in the process of turning the divit (okay, large depression) left by the dead maple tree he dug out earlier this summer into a rain garden. Spent most of the summer getting out the stump and its roots (can’t grind it down if it’s going to be rain garden, it seems). Now we have a big muddy pit. It’s a little too tempting some days to sit down in the middle of it and make mud pies.

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  8. I’m high and dry, safe and warm, but some of my oldest friends haven’t been so lucky. I’ve said before that I’m originally from Faribault. It’s only about 15 miles from Waterville and I go there for walks in River Bend Nature Center often. I usually take Pippin there every Friday after work.

    I knew the Straight River was going to be high and that there would be some flooding. I was curious to see how the trails near the river at RBNC had fared. But lots of streets and roads are closed. I never made it to RBNC. And now I’m sure that the trails I wanted to hike will be closed for a long time.

    The downtown area immediately east of Central Avenue (Faribault’s main drag) is closed and partially under water. My friends live in a historic house (circa 1852) right on the east bank of the river. The street I usually use to get to their house is closed and under water. The river is right up to their patio. Their garage is almost completely submerged. I stopped to see if they were okay and they were. They said the river crested yesterday and they expect it to go down now. They were very upbeat, although they know they have lots of damage. I hope I have such courage and a positive attitude if some tragedy ever happens to me.

    I’ve never seen anything like it in Faribault. It’s truly a historic flood! I can’t even remember when there has been anything even close. I read online this morning about Northfield. It sounds worse there. I think part of the downtown area is completely flooded.

    Anyway, I know lots of people are struggling and I wish them the best. It’s raining out there right now! 😦

    I really don’t wanna
    Go to Owatonna
    The river’s been rising for three long days

    Got to warn Alanna
    ‘Cuz she’s from Owatonna
    They’ve closed all the highways

    The flora and the fauna
    From around ol’ Owatonna
    Have all seen better days

    A wall o’water’s been on a
    Collision course with Owatonna
    And we’re waiting for the sunshine rays

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  9. Good Morning to All,

    The water has g0ne down in the part of my garden that was under water and the water has stopped runing into the sump pump basin in my basement. There was some water running across our basement floor for a while due to a plugged drain and slow acting sump pump, but that has ended. Travel from Clarks Grove to the North was a problem yesterday due to many roads being closed. Low lying farm fields are filled with water. We have had more rain here in the past, but that came in the summer, not at harvest time. Clarks Grove is not in a flood area and didn’t get as much rain as some other near by towns, so we didn’t have any big problems.

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  10. When we lived in Winnipeg we had a garden plot outside of the city, (an on the wrong side of the floodway)and one fall the garden flooded and I remember trying to salvage our harvest standing ankle deep in water. Everything rotted. When the Red floods, there is no where for the water to go. A couple of years ago we flooded our own basement when we didn’t know that a rain spout that drained the water away from the house had come off and the water seeped through a small hole in the foundation. It was only enough to get the carpets wet, but what a chore to pull the carpet and dry everything off.

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  11. Will have to read later…
    We lived 2 blocks from the Mississippi when in Winona, and we weren’t there long enough to experience any floods… But in high school my I was driving my friends around in the Tan Bomb (1950 Plymouth) during one deluge, came close to where the river WAS flooding. In our wisdom we decided to plough through anyway. A newer car might not have made it, but the 1950 models were apparently watertight, like a Volkswagen maybe?

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  12. Morning–

    Again, personally, we survived this storm relatively unscathed…
    Unfortunately part of the main bridge through Oronoco has collapsed and Northbound Hwy 52 is closed by Pine Island due to a culvert collapse; figuring a week on that.

    I only have a few fields that are on low ground; and the lowest, wettest ones I put in CRP this spring, so don’t have to worry about trying to harvest them. Will only be a few acres now that might be tricky…
    My ducks are enjoying the water puddles all over. We’re down in a valley and get lots of springs coming up around the barns and yard… but the house is on higher ground… and Silver Creek is about 100 yards away and downhill from the farm yet… We side-benefited from Rochester’s Flood Control project because there’s a large ‘water control structure’ and ‘water retention pond’ (it’s NOT a Lake) upstream from us so the creek don’t rise much down here…
    Sometimes we get a damp floor in the basement; never had more than maybe 1/2″ on the floor… I remember my parents once trying to chisel a hole through the cement in the floor to drain the water. Not sure why they thought that was a good idea…..
    When this house was being built in 1968 there was a large rainstorm after the footings had been poured and cement block walls were up. So the basement filled with water. I have pictures of our family bailing water from one ‘room’ to another in order to dump it out the ‘windows’…

    The big Rochester Flood of 1978 I remember helping the church go to peoples homes and clean out their basements; lots of senior citizens — and their basements filled with, dare I say, junk? Canned goods, magazines, ect… all sopping wet. Eww.
    And on the farm, all the fences washed out by the creek; my Dad and two neighboring farmers standing in the pasture, all of their cows in a big mass and them pointing and saying ‘That one, those two, that one, and those three are mine. ‘ ‘Those four are mine’ until they got them all sorted out. And then several days of ‘making fence’ again…

    Good Luck everyone! Not raining here yet…

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  13. We all feel bad for Owatonna
    Their weekend’s ruined, just ask Donna
    But as flora flourishes, so should Husqvarna
    And say, by the way, what the hell is fauna??

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  14. Like others, I have had unexpected flooding in my house from faulty pipes (like the flood that started with a leaky pipe in the upstairs apartment of my old duplex, causing the ceiling in my bathroom to develop quite a bulge…and then a deluge…resulting in a new ceiling, new pipes and new wallpaper).

    I also remember as a kid visiting Hannibal, MO. The idea was to visit some of the Twain-related stuff there. Only most of main street and up about to the supposed “white-washed fence” of Tom’s was under river water, so we wound up not seeing much. But I do remember being quite astonished with seeing that much water on the roads and sidewalks. And wondering how people lived if their houses were downhill from the water line.

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  15. OK, at the risk of sounding really dense, I’m apparently missing something.
    another test… and now it is supposted to be in italics?

    (I’m posting it here too so hopefully it will be seen easier.)

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    2. I just reread Steve’s instructions, and I see what I did wrong. One more try: italics, then bold, and then strike, I hope.

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      1. OK, I just reread Anna’s instructions… I’m so sorry for so #$@&*!&$^ many posts — if there were a way to practice elsewhere I would.
        Let’s see: italics, then bold, and finally strike. With any luck…

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      3. I’m doing something wrong when I try to end it. I’m supposed to put a backslash inside the carats and in front of the “i”, right?

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  18. Northfield is pretty wet downtown. Only one bridge is open to go from the west side to the east side. Our next-door neighbors had water in their basement, but we’re OK so far. Many sandbags downtown. Ducks swimming in Ames Park. One of our favorite eating and drinking establishments, Froggy Bottoms, got inundated because the sandbags didn’t hold. You can’t really see our dam/waterfall because the river on both sides of the dam is the same depth. Good to see the sun now.

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  19. I hadn’t realized how bad Zumbro Falls, Hammond and Millville were doing… All towns along the Zumbro river… Prayers for everyone in those towns…

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  20. Greetings! We lived in Bloomington during the 1987 flood and we had a condo. Jim drove home from 2nd shift through buckets of rain safely. He drove an old tank Buick that leaked, so he parked his car in garage. My nice newer car sat on street and was totally flooded. The streets were flooded and the nearby pond became a lake. Such is life …

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