Our hard work has paid off – our driveway survived 4 inches of rain in 24 hours

I was aware of Hurricane Helene. I wondered what its path would be across land. Thursday morning I decided to look at the prediction. S___T! The path was predicted to go directly across this area – with us in the center of the path. We were NOT ready for heavy rain.

After completion of the big terrace the end of June, we had been putting off further work on rain water diversion until it got cooler instead focusing on painting over the brown wall and trim in the main living area. We were psyched to complete it on Thursday as we were tired of the painting clutter/chaos.

However, we changed gears and went into full water diversion mode. Since we built the terrace we had a couple of heavy rains that suggested that we needed to divert water flowing through the magic forest and down the top of the driveway. To attack this we needed LONG straight pieces of wood. We looked for 20-25 foot telephone poles but there were none within 100 miles. As there were several down cedar trees in the magic forest, Craig decided we should just repurpose those instead of using telephone poles.

Craig started doing measurements, deciding which trees we should use where and removing branches. in the meantime I was digging 4 inch trenches where we wanted to lay the logs. Two of the logs needed to be on our side of the fence which meant maneuvering the trucks through the gate. It could’have been easy if we could use Katie to lift them over the fence but there were trees along the fence preventing the easy way.

While I was digging trenches and breaking up roots, I kept wondering how Craig was planning on getting the long trucks through the hole in the fence. By mid afternoon, Craig turned over the branch removal on the last trunk to me while he got ready to move the trunks. It was around 5 when we were ready to move the trunks. Fortunately the rain originally predicted for 5 held off until 8 PM. It is amazing what Craig can do with a small tractor, a hook and a lot of ingenuity. We used Katie to position the trunks through the gate at just the right angle and maneuvered it forward (from behind) as far as he could. He then moved Katie and pulled it into place.

It was dark as we were getting last trunk in place and the ground was too low in the center so water could go underneath. There was no time to fix it as it was dark and the rain was almost here so I laid some smaller limbs in the low area hoping they would combine to help divert/slow down the water. I stopped at 730 PM while Craig worked another 30 minutes to get a better “fit” on the main trunk inside the gate.

While I thought I was keeping up on fluids during the day, I was not. I was so sore I could barely go up and down the steps. I forced fluids, gatorade and took Motrin and was not all that stiff on Friday but we were both really WIPED OUT. It rained steady for about 40 hours – most was moderately heavy. We did not have that much wind. From what we could see from indoors yesterday, it looked like there was much less water running down the top of the driveway. We were hopeful there would be less washout of the driveway.

Late this morning, after the rain had stopped, I went out to explore and was so excited to see that the area that in the past would have been a canyon was just a gully. The driveway was intact. We were lucky that the path of the storm was more to the east so we were at the edge rather than in the center of the path.

We still have two more logs to move in place one at the top of the driveway and one just below where we built the terrace and then we can start bringing in some soil to replace what has been lost and use berms, retaining walls and plants to help retain our soil.

We will repair the driveway again – with much more confidence that it will not wash out in a major way again.