Blogging helps me share things with people. My goal is for you to see something that brings a smile to you.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

2016-March 14, Lake Bistineau flooding



On March 9th, 2016 the area where I live got about 20 inches in 30 hours.  Some places nearby got more and some places got less but where we were that's what we had to deal with.  I live on a bayou and because of that I was greatly concern.  I kept a close eye on the bayou and the weather.  The thing that concerned me was with all that rain in such a short period time is the fact it didn't have time to soak into the ground and thus it was run off which lead to a lot of flash flooding in the area.  I knew it was really bad when I heard they had to close down I-20 in Bossier and Webster parishes due to water coming onto the roads.  All that water had to go some where and its ended up in our lakes and reservoirs.
     My spouse and I also have some property on Lake Bistineau and had heard about all the flooding there.  Our neighbors were telling us they had never seen the lake so high. We were concerned and on March 14th the roads had been open again in areas and due to daylight savings time we figured we had enough time to get down to the lake and back during daylight hours.
    We knew from the news we couldn't go our normal way since those road were still closed.  That didn't really surprise us since last June they got closed to flooding too.  Here's a link to that post.
http://rockhoundingaround.blogspot.com/2015/06/6-14-2015-camp-and-lake-bistineau.html

Here's the one image I wanted to share with you from that period of time.
water over the Lake Bistineau dam June 14, 2015
You can see the water clearly over the dam.  At that time everyone was amazed at how high the water had gotten.  We were impressed too and thought that was the maximum it would get.  But we wrong about that.
(Here's an image of the same area with the flooding during that period of time. )
This is taken from the same area as the very first one, and you can see how much higher the water is now.
We had marveled over June flood because 7 months earlier the lake was at a low. After this things went back to normal and I really regret not getting pictures of that like I had in March when things were at a normal stage for the lake, so you can see how much things have gone up.  But I do have images of when its at a normal level..  http://rockhoundingaround.blogspot.com/2015/03/lake-bisteneau-on-3-28-2015.html
And I have the images of when it was dry last Nov 2014.http://rockhoundingaround.blogspot.com/2015/05/lake-bisteneau-nov-28-2014.html


Now we can't get over it's even higher than it was last June and back then everyone was surprised by the height of that. It's just so amazing - UNBELIEVABLE!
I'm going to show some pictures of the flooding compared to the drought just so you can get an idea of the magnitude of the water we're dealing with.

First off when we drove up to the house we couldn't even get to the house due to the inlet being so high.
But our neighbor has a road to his place that is on the other side of our house that we knew we could probably take to get to our place since we could see it above the water when we looked over at it.
So we tried it and was able to finally get onto our property.  By using a stairway that connects our places. 
Here's another view of the inlet being so full. 
 This is what it looks like when it was dry

 

But what we were mostly concern with was to see if the house had flooded and so far it hasn't.


 Here's the image we're usually looking at when we sit on the porch.
In  this one you can't even see the water. but look at the tree that has the branches close to the ground and the bush.

 Here's the same tree and water up to the bush.
 The house is dry but I couldn't say the same about the boat house.  We've had it flooded before but never like this.
Here's some of the images when it was high and dry.
 

 These are the trees that are to the left of the boathouse.
 And here's what it looks like now.  This I had to take from the neighbors road.

Here it is again, cropped and enlarged.
Here's how my neighbors boathouses look.
When it was dry you can't see the boat house but you can see the dock.
Now here's how it is zoomed in through cropping
And here's my other neighbors boat house that shows how bad things really are.
 Look how dry it was in November
and now.
For my own sake I did take a 32 second video of this area.


Like I said its unbelievable...


No comments:

Post a Comment