Ridgecrest Flooding Sunday July 20th, 2008

It didn't seem like it rained that long (only an hour or 2), but it did rain pretty heavy. All the rain that fell in the mountains made it's way into the valley and created a flash flood through the city. Here is a link to a video of the flooding. Most of this video was shot 2 blocks from our house at Gateway and Church.



http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-48192



We decided to walk around and let the dogs play a bit. Here are some pictures that we took. Notice how close our backyard was to being flooded!









We were also watching a co-worker's pool. I didn't think about it, but he called and asked me to check the water level and drain some water if it was too high. After the water level in the streets went down so we could drive again, which was about 10pm, we went over there. Sure enough the water was about 8 inches too high. The worst part was that his flowerbed overflowed and put a bunch of dirt in the pool. It was so murky that you couldn't see the bottom, even in the shallow end.



We put a hose onto the filter output and let the filter run for a few hours. After seeing that it was only half way, we decided to go home and leave it running. Michelle went back over there at 2am to turn the filter off and the water was finally down to the correct level. Filtering the water for those 4 hours also cleared up most of the dirt that was in the pool. The next day I went to check on it again to see how it was doing. The water level was good, but now it was green. You could tell that the algae had started to grow. Good think the owner would be back later in the day to add some chlorine. Too bad I don't have any pics of the pool :(