Christmas Flood

A state of emergency was declared this Christmas here in the south.  It rained for days.  And when I say rained, I mean POURED.  Like crazy flooding rain for hours and hours and hours.  It thunder stormed for days.  Like, storm after storm after storm.

We feel incredibly blessed because we only lost power for a few short hours, because we don't have a basement and had no flooding, because we live on higher elevations in both our rental house and the new house, and because we had zero tornadoes.

Here are some pictures of the pond in our back yard that can show you how much rain we got.  They said somewhere between 6-8 inches in the last 24 hours, but we got way more before that.  The final tally was 9.6 inches in three days.

Flooded in December 2015:  (if you click on this, you'll see better)

Almost buried fountain (it's stays off and the turtles sun
themselves on it)

The sides of the pond are SO HIGH.

Can you see the no swimming sign is half buried in
the back there?

Look how brown the water is.  All that runoff made the water so brown.

Something to compare it to (August 2015):

Much lower sides of pond.  See how much higher that pipe is?

This is the fountain thing that is almost buried now.

And here are some pictures from around town:

This is the road we drive every day to the new house.

Here's the flood

Mudslide

Flooded road by the Feed Mill

Road going back to our church

Down trees

Again, we are the fortunate ones.  I'm praying for those who are flooded - houses and businesses.  And I'm even sad for those who couldn't celebrate Christmas with their families because all the roads were closed.  :-(