Posted by zog
on October 12, 2009, 12:25 pm
The creek is right back to topping the banks again and the weather says more rain and floods until late this evening, then one day no rain, then back to more days of rain. My new designed and built barricade is holding, except one of the four hanging sheet metal panels broke away on one end, got twisted, bent, and is hung up on another panel.
The bend is forcing the barricade down instead of allowing it to rise up directly with more water flow and slip water underneath, it's caught angled down and the water pressure wants it to dive instead of rise. So far it is holding, but another inch of rain...I don't think so.
Hopefully, and this was the plan, the bottom panels all tear away and fold up to the sides where they can be recovered, leaving the upper support fencing intact. If this fails again I simply will have to go to a more elaborate setup with cranks and pulleys so it can be raised or lowered. Which will suck, a lot more work and ten times the expense most likely. All this other I built I used junk crap that was kicking around. Either that or a huge double gate system that can just be tied in the middle with chintzy rope, and that will just bust open with water pressure and swing to the sides during flood stages.
Either way I don't have the equipment/stuff to build them so it would have to be scrounged elsewhere for cheap or purchased. I *might* be able to weld together some big gate things with some stuff I have here, maybe anyway. Thin wall tubing is sorta difficult for me meagre welding skillz.
The major problem here is the huge variance in creek depth, it goes from just a trickle or less, just a few algae covered pools over the rocks at drought stage to over ten feet deep or more (I think it hit 12 feet judging by the stuff caught in the pasture fences) like in the floods from two saturdays ago.
The county here hasn't near completed cleaning out the ditches and culverts yet, so much more rain will mean a lot more street flooding in low areas.
Farming..it's not a job, it's an adventure! Oh ya, another wild dog pack moved in the other day, I still haven't thinned them out yet, I wasn't toting a rifle at the time and didn't want to take hail mary shots with a small pocket chunker. And I am in no position economically to try and cqtch them and tame them up and take care of them, I am at the limit for rescue dogs, so getting culled is in their fate if they don't move on soon, because they'll start killing calfs soon, or at least try. The alleged flock guard donkey we have is so-so with keeping wild dogs away from the beefs. I haven't lost one, but two of them lost part of their tails, and only dogs or coyotes in packs can do that really.
Not sure of the size of the pack, one day I caught sight of four, the other day just two, ranging in size from around a 20 lb or so yapper to looks to be some big mutt, like pit bull boxer hybrid or great dane or something (big square muzzle but kinda reddish brown pit pull coloration) maybe at around 90 lbs or so, slightly taller and heavier than our tallest dog, the young black lab puppy (who I bet will top out over 100 lbs when she is done growing, already over 80 and still putting on the dog muscle beef, proly another six months or so gaining weight. MAN can she eat the food, she gets fed twice a day instead of once like the other dogs, and eats twice as much per meal as the other really large dog we have, a mature white lab female).
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