Our Own Personal Flood

After my several blogs about not wanting flood insurance, it would be ironic if my home were flooded now that I finally don’t have to buy it. Our “flood” was only in the back yard, fortunately, and resulted from a cracked garden pipe. This was not the flood of Gilgamesh…

Like pieces of a broken pot lay the pieces of land among the spreading water.
So high did the water go that even the gods scrambled for mountain so high
And cringed like rain whipped dogs in the storm.

This was not the flood of Noah…

The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters.
And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered;
the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

But it did make a big mess and cost us $500 to fix. What you see in the photo at the left above are the roots and pipe that caused the problem. We think a root from one of our big ash trees cracked the PVC pipe which connects to the hose bib or water spigot. I noticed that there was mud for several days in the walkway near WP 668, our backyard caboose where I have my office. My husband looked at it, dug a hole from which shot up a spout of water, found he could not turn it off, then called Polo’s Landscaping (408-597-5214) to come help.

It turns out that a previous owner of our Willow Glen house had put in a garden water line upstream of the house and garden water shut off valves. So, the only way we could turn off that particular pipe was to turn off the water service to the whole property. We ended up with two large muddy holes – one near the caboose, and the other near the valves in the front yard. After much digging around in my (former) iris bed, Polo found the pipe that should have had the shut off valve on it, buried two feet down. He and his team did a good job. By the end of the day, we had a new shut off valve and a fixed water pipe. The brick walkway sank a little but once the ground dries out some, I will lift the bricks and add some more sand.

Images by Katy Dickinson, Copyright 2010