The Great Flood of 2009

Ok so now that you have seen all the posts with all the snow it's time to see the aftermath. Once the snow stopped falling, the temperatures rose significantly melting a lot of the snow that was sitting up in the mountains and in addition we were lucky enough to get a whole bunch of rain. When these three things happen all at the same time the rivers fill up and we get to enjoy a flood.

This is a road about a mile from our house that leads to a park where we walk Archie. The river runs perpendicular to this road, if you were to keep going straight you would walk/drive right into it. As you can kind of see, the river has come over its banks and flooded this road all the way up past the park entrance. The people at the end of this road must have had water in their houses.

This is the river in between the park above and the golf course below. You can't really see the banks of the river because the water is right at the top of them. The straight thingy in the middle is a full sized tree that has been ripped out of the bank at some point and is just tootling along. Aaron got to witness the kind of damage that a root ball from a tree this size can cause as it travels down the river. Not Pretty.

This is difficult to see but it is one of the fairways at the golf course across the highway from our neighbourhood. It became a river tributary as the river overflowed it's banks and took a short cut.

This is another view of the Fairway/River.

This is the Maple Valley Highway bridge that spans the part of the river as it begins to encircles our neighbourhood (Colleen you might remember this is the one we went over then immediately down under so Archie could go in the water) . They have closed off one of the lanes of the bridge because they think there may be structural damage to the foundation. Just beyond this bridge is the house of one of our neighbours we know quite well, Jack Lyon. He said the water got to about 3 feet from his back door. They were definitely doing some sandbagging there.

It was amazing to see the river this high and people who have lived here for a long time say they haven't seen it like this for decades. We have been assured by our neighbour, Dennis that even if the river floods really really badly we will simply have water front property and that it is very unlikely to reach our house. Despite his reassurances, out home owners insurance is kept up to date!