October 14, 2022
When it rains in east Texas it rains. My brother called me early in the morning to see if we were ok. He had been watching the weather and saw Dallas had flood areas after receiving more than 12 inches of rain overnight. We were ok. But, it was raining hard at the ranch and we did not know what to expect. This was our first hard rain and I needed to check drainage patterns, hope the roof of the house would not leak, and what about " the drain". (No way was I going to get a plumber to work in this rain today. See the drain story).
Beth and I braved the early rain to drive down to the barn. Thankfully the barn was ok. I put a bucket under the only small leak we found. Winter was cleaning the stalls. Instead of putting the boarded horses on the hot walker, she simply moved them to the covered runs. That gave them a larger area to walk around and was still covered.
The drain was full, heck the whole place was covered with water and small ponds. However, every place where we checked the drain pattern was reasonable and nothing was washing out. The ranch has been here many years so I should have expected it had seen hard rain in the past. One small problem at the guest house. A down spout had come loose and the gutter was running that water under the house. Guest house is on pillars but I got a piece of plywood and diverted the water away.
Late afternoon the rain stopped so we went back to the stalls to find the drain line outlet. Ivy had placed a marker in line with the drain sump while it was being constructed so we had an idea where to look. We started with a shovel thinking "this can't be hard to find". Then we started pulling the weeds, the ground was soft so it was a good time to pull weeds. Still couldn't find the drain line outlet. By this time we had cleared an area about 15' wide directly in line with where the drain outlet should have been. Of course we started with an assumption the drain line would take a straight and logical path. Let's expand the search area Beth said. So we walked and looked all around. I mean all around probably covering 200'. They only thing we found was the small pond had now become a big pond. Because of drainage and the rain it was full to the brim. I recalled two days earlier when Swazie was concerned the fish in the small pond were going to die as the pond level was so low. Note to self, find a way to move water from the big pond to the small pond.
Back to hunting for the drain line outlet. I got a long rebar piece and started carefully pounding it into the soft ground where logic said the drain outlet should be. 6 inch drain so I poked that rebar every 5 inches the entire 15 foot area where the drain should be. No luck at all! The rain started again. Beth and I were muddy to our knees time to call it quits for the day and develop a different plan.
That night we learned it had rained more than five inches in the past 24 hours. Seemed a reasonable estimate to me because I had pumped about that amount out of the swimming pool. To many of you 5 inches isn't an abnormal amount of rain, please consider we are used to Albuquerque where the average annual rain total is just 9 inches.
