Heavy Rain is Never Fun

When we built our house into the subdivision 12 years ago, the developer put in a gully to hold rain. He told us the water should never fill the gully to the point of reaching the area behind our property. He showed us a survey where that location was considered a "100 year flood plain". In other words, the area of the gully behind our property should only fill once every 100 years.

Since then, the gully fills at least twice per year.

When we complained to the developer, he said "You have nothing to complain about. The water is all on my property."

We have some heavy rain yesterday. As expected, the gully started to fill.

It continued filling until it passed the bolder (marking the property line) and overtook the back of the wing set. 

Meanwhile, my sump pump crock was filling and emptying every 5 seconds! Our poor sump pump has been running for 12 years! Fearing it could fail, we installed a backup water powered pump. I spent most of the day keeping an eye of the sump pump expecting it to fail at any time. Luckily, it kept going!

The yard filled with water. Because I keep dumping loads of gravel onto my driveway, my driveway now sits higher than my garage. This caused water to enter the garage. I had an inch of water within two feet of the garage door. Luckily, nothing was ruined.

I quickly remembered to turn off the irrigation system for the flowers. The last thing we needed was to add more water to an already wet mess!

Today, the gully water has receeded as the rain lightened. Rain is never fun for a home owner - especially this much rain. It wouldn't take much to have a devastating effect.