… after yesterday’s torrential rain in Ireland. Not that my house was particularly affected, apart from the concrete paths in my garden getting really waterlogged, but the situation was very different in a lot of places - twenty feet of water in a brand-new underpass in Belfast, for example! and I’m not sure which bus routes will be running tomorrow.
I did end up thigh-deep in flood water though, when Marion got locked out of her house and needed me to bring the spare key. I ended up spending the night there after we piled stuff from low places onto high places, and herded her cats and dog into the house. She’s gone through one very serious flood there, back in 1999, and we had our fingers crossed that she wouldn’t have to do it again. The river running along the back of her house was very high, but it was the tributary that runs under the road just next to her house (behind the wall you can see in those photos) that was the problem as it overflows badly onto the road even in ‘normally’ heavy rain.
The water did get a couple of inches higher than shown in the ‘during’ photo (it was just over my knees at that point, and was a good bit higher when I waded back through later on to check my car was in a high-enough spot), and high-tide was somewhere around 8:30pm. The flood started subsiding by about 11 though, and when I woke up at 6ish this morning and went to check, there was nothing but a small puddle and a lot of debris on the road.
Not everyone was as lucky though - there’s a big clean-up operation going on in Ireland today.
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Eeeeep. As soon as I saw flood and then Marion, I was worried. She definitely does not need to go through that again! Though I thought that the causeway or whatever it’s called, the one that funnels that tributary under the road, was fixed a couple of years after the flood that took her out?
Hard to believe it’s been that long, too, though thinking back of course it’s been that long.
I think the word you’re looking for is ‘culvert’. They did make it a lot wider a few years ago, which has usually helped - but when there’s enough water to flood a new underpass in Belfast with 20 feet of water, and to fill the rivers and streams by Marion’s so much, a bigger drain can’t make much of a difference!
Everything was alright though, thankfully. No evacuation needed (which was just as well as I think my cats would’ve had conniptions with a lot of strangers visiting them).