Water Woes Update

Well, the rain has stopped. For now. Another big storm on it's way for the weekend. We are currently under a boil water advisory because the city water plant got overrun with all the silt in the river. But that is the least of my worries.

After my last post, my neighbor to be Chris, who is building the new house beside us came over to say that he had been informed by the City that neighbors below us had complained about all the water that was running off of our property on to ours. Oh O. As it turns out, property owners are responsible for the water that drains from their property. Oops. Sorry. Didn't know.

So what do you do with all that water? I had visions of going and big buying a wet vac and getting out in the yard and then...well... I guess that wasn't going to work, was it?

As it turns out, the city also informed us that we actually have storm drains at the back of our property. The idea is that we were to build a swail to direct the runoff into the drain and keep the it from going all the way down the hill.

Well, I've never seen any storm drain down our hill, just a couple of man-holes and a clean-out access. But Chris had a map and a metal detector, and sure enough we found one on his property and then we dug up half our back yard and found ours. It had been buried under about a foot of dirt long before we bought the place. Never knew it was there. Would have never found it either, if Chris hadn't given me a hand.

But I'm glad we found it. It only makes sense that the developer would have put one there. I just wish that I would have known about it before we had our basic landscaping done. Now we'll have to get the big digger back in and reshape the lower portion of our lot so that the runoff gets swallowed by our newly discovered drain.