New rain ditch drama
Hurricane (cough) tropical storm Barry came and went…
I appreciate the concern down in NOLA because of high water levels in the MS river, and wet ground, but I hadn’t seen an inch of rain total in Hickory the last two weeks.
After three full days of flash flood watch we got a total of 5” of rain. In past storms I’ve seen 5” of rain in three hours.
This is not a bad thing, kind of like leaving the sprinkler on over the entire weekend. We needed the 5” of rain, slow is good.
Since I’ve seen more rain, in less time this should have been a non-event…. but midday yesterday I noticed that my drain box at the top of my 6” buried drain pipe, was floating up on top of the ditch water… (WTF?).
It appears an improvement I made a couple weeks ago to add a filter screen (using a web bag that supermarket fruit comes in) over the inlet to reduce debris. Apparently this worked too well and clogged up. Mostly at the top where sediment floats on the water. The outlet side still drained well so the water inside the drain box became less than the water outside in the ditch and it floated up.
After things stabilize, I will pack some more soil around the drain box. The silt pool by the inlet port may be deeper than I need.
I loaded down the drain box to hold it down with a bucket of water, because it wouldn't stay down even after water flowed in.
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Because of the dearth of rain, I decided to close off my french drain in my front yard… the pecan trees don’t mind some standing water (they drink lots of water). I put the french drain box top grille in a zip lock bag to close it off… Apparently I miscalculated, the grille in a closed zip lock bag floated up and did not close the french drain, so I will work on a more effective seal for next time it rains.
Yesterday there were minnows in my back ditch (new small ones, not the same old ones). Today the back ditch is already dry. That 6" drain pipe works well, and the ground was dry enough to soak up only 5" of rain.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy
JR