Do I need and Ark?

I had a great realtor on my first house. Then I bought 6 acres to put a house on. Then I got a county soil type map. Free.. Found out it was some of the worst gumbo clay there is.

Ended up buying a stone house south of Wichita. Built in 55. Whole town / Udall was leveled by a tornado that yr. It has a basement that still gets wet after adding a 2nd sump.

Love the old house now. Gkids love coming to mama and papas. Got 2 here now. Some days I feel like the luckiest man on earth. And that's good enough for me..

Btw , it rained all night here. Still gloomy and the pumps have been running.

Could be worse..

Ever think of piling up a berm? A speed bump high enough you don't need the floodgates, that you can drive over. I don't literally have that, but there's a high sidewalk to drive over and my lot is downhill.

The house on one side of me is a rental for quite some time. The various occupants each get their first winter of the garage flooding because the owner hires whatever clown works cheap so he got a new driveway that didn't channel the water away. It'll be that way until the 75-80 year old guy that owns it dies and his kids sell it to someone who cares to fix the problem.

Yes, speed bump your driveway.

That's what I did. I have a pipe I can open if needed to drain my lot, but it won't come up my driveway and flood my sheds anymore. My street becomes a river about 12" deep if it rains 2 inches in an hour or so. But first, I had to put the berm around a chain link fence on one side of the property. On that side, the street water would run up the neighbors driveway, and then flow through my yard, and back out to the street.

About 150 foot long, two feet high berm. Took me about 5 years of recreational/therapeutic digging workout program to make the berm. The place the dirt came from now collects all my run off from the 1/3 acre, and is where I have the lawn. Once that went in, I could put a hump in my driveway.

The other day we got inch and a half, but it took all day. Street barely ran. But I can flood from the street if we get a good gut buster of a summer storm. The one that made me start digging, we got 3 inches in 45 min. We get another one like that, I'm going to shoot the street in a kayak.

An Ark would be good these days
Keeping the Coronavirus away

Dauntless said:

Ever think of piling up a been? A speed bump high enough you don't need the floodgates, that you can drive over. I don't literally have that, but there's a high sidewalk to drive over and my lot is downhill.

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dogman dan said:

Yes, speed bump your driveway.

That's what I did. I have a pipe I can open if needed to drain my lot, but it won't come up my driveway and flood my sheds anymore. My street becomes a river about 12" deep if it rains 2 inches in an hour or so. But first, I had to put the berm around a chain link fence on one side of the property. On that side, the street water would run up the neighbors driveway, and then flow through my yard, and back out to the street.

About 150 foot long, two feet high berm. Took me about 5 years of recreational/therapeutic digging workout program to make the berm. The place the dirt came from now collects all my run off from the 1/3 acre, and is where I have the lawn. Once that went in, I could put a hump in my driveway.

Click to expand...

The bump idea was looked into. I even had the town out to look at what I had to do to stay friends with them.
However, if you look at the photos, there's really no way a bump into the driveway can control that much water.
We're talking literally millions of gallons of water. And a strong enough current to take you right off your feet...I know.

And I would have to have, a minimum of 1.5 ' high berm. No car can get over that unless its a rock climber. I would have to fill in and slope it halfway to my garage. The wakes and splash from the vehicles throw water over three feet high into my yard. So it would be of little use and be unsightly as well. I did put a berm on the right side, just before the intersection. The water has yet to reach the top at any point along that berm.

Nothing like experience
I've been monitoring this for over twenty-five years, so I'm somewhat of an expert when it comes to my home and surrounding street. I even had an engineer try to tell me how the floodwater flows. He had his maps and everything.
I can tell you this. There are basically three flood levels here. Mini, Major, Massive. The photo's for the 2010 flood would be a category Massive. Usually, we have mini's, or maybe a mini-major.

I lived here, I've seen and I've learned. I never did see anyone from the town out here checking to make sure the water flowed where they said it is supposed to. He was what my stepdad used to call, " a book-learned idiot". The man had absolutely no concept of what really happens during a flood situation, regarding my home and street.

On the left side, I have a two-block high retaining wall along my chain link fence. It's there so worst case, the water can't come around the end of my front block wall and back into my yard, which it has done. The problem with that is, it also keeps water in. So I've made sure it channels to the back part of the yard, and empties out there. Sorry neighbor. But the amount is much less than what it would take to flood his yard. Most of it stays on the easement road.

But it's all good since I built my flood gates. They have relieved me of a lot of stress.
If I'm going to be away for any period of time, I make sure they are closed.

This summer or sooner now, I plan on replacing them with a better metal swing gate system.
Just the other night I was looking for 'rising hinges'. I want to use them so that when the gates close, they will drop down and help seal the bottom. Easy peasy.

Yes, same thing in my yard.. I can't have a berm high enough either, to keep it all out. It took a berm two feet tall, and hundreds of feet long, to keep my uphill neighbors driveway flooding from running downhill into my yard through the chain link fence, making it into a river that flowed out my driveway. I could not berm my driveway till I stopped that. Took about 5 years of recreational digging to make the ponding area in my backyard bigger, providing the dirt for that berm.

It was a crapton of work. But it got done one wheelbarrow of dirt per day. Very hard clay in my yard, so digging only done when it was just flooded, again, and easy to dig.

Then I put a smaller berm in my driveway. No, its not going to do anything next time my street runs deep enough to kayak it. But it does very effectively keep my ponding area in back from filling up with nasty weed seeds contaminated water every time the road runs 3 inches deep.

It was a very long project, but worth it. Goatheads are now eliminated in my backyard, and I can walk my lawn barefoot again. Next project, gradually raising the grade of my entire driveway, so that floods of more than a foot in the street stay out. Right now, my smaller driveway berm will over top when the street gets 12" deep.

Do I need an Ark ?

Just_Ed , When I read this title from someone who lives in the Desert ( Apple Valley a Dry area of Southern California where it hardly ever rains/ gets very little rain each year) .

It gave me a good laugh . :lol:

Not laughing at your situation , just the title , having lived in another Desert area of Southern California for a number of years myself .

Same here, the rain statistics from the dust bowl look like heaven to me. We never get as much as the dust bowl did in the thirties.

But then half the years rain comes in one or two days, and there we are, a foot of water in the yard, 3 inches in all my sheds full of bikes, and another three years trying to get the goatheads out of my back lawn. I have my yard set up now for rain harvesting to the lawn, so my lawn self waters if we get a sprinkle. It all drains to that hole I dug, and I replanted the lawn in the hole. Most of the property is xeriscaped.

But I sure don't need a foot of water that ran down the hill from upstream, full of weed seeds. Which was happening every time we got more than an inch of rain in an hour. My street follows the route of an historic drainage, so it will always run like a river when it does rain much.

Before I bought the house, I did eyeball the grade above the street, and the water never comes close to flooding the house. Just the yard, and the sheds in the yard. The house is 2 feet higher. Just enough grade so it flows by. Another neighborhood a block away gets the ponding, due to poor grading by the contractor that built that street. When we get the flow, three houses on that street go on sale the following winter, like clockwork. Those houses have to sandbag.