Today's Update on River Flooding

This is the blog post I tried to get to load into the blog, but it wouldn't "go" the day I did it.  These are flooding photos from the road... Not much has changed since then, except there are more mosquitoes!  See the next post to see flooding by air!
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We took a short walk down to the end of the street today with Skippy to take some photos of the flooding of the commons.  Today the newspaper said it was official: the river is above flood stage.

This is our neighbor's house that is usually on the south side of the river.  

Well, technically, it's still on the south side of the river - where the river should be; but the river is roaming!  Now the river appears to be almost, if not completely, surrounding it, but I don't think it really is.  I was talking to the family at church last week.  They said that when the house was built in 1898, it was set up on higher ground.  So, it has never really gotten flooded, I guess.  Last year, the flood completely covered the only access road to their property.  This year they decided to spend a few weeks with family while the river does its thing.

This is the cement plant, which you probably can't really see all that well in the videos.  It's a local landmark - and on bike riding days, you look for which way the smoke is coming out of the smoke stack to see which direction you should be riding to have the wind at your back.

From this angle, it looks like the flood water is closer to the plant than it really is; but the river is certainly pretty far out of its banks.  When not flooded, the river is just behind the bushes in the middle of the photo, and is only about 20 feet wide at its widest point.  In drier times, there really isn't much - if any - water in the commons area - which is in front of the bushes.  Just soggy in some spots, with alkali at the soil surface.

Here is a video of the view from the end of our street.

It probably is a little difficult to compare to the previous one from the other day, but the water is somewhat closer to the road today, I think.  It looks a little deeper to me, but maybe that is because the color of the water looks a little darker - maybe because of the time of day (about 5:30 p.m.) and angle of the sun.


Here's a new video from the frog/toad spot down the road.