Saturday, September 25, 2010

Continuing oh so Minnesota - in this case Austin

It started raining Wednesday afternoon by the buckets and continued all through the night.  We heard there was flooding north of us so thought we would be in trouble here too. So Thursday around noon we went to see if there was sand out for sandbagging but didn't see any.  The news that evening was about flooding all around us but not Austin.  Then Friday morning Amanda called and said the schools were closed because of flooding, she thought she could get to her school to do some work but she could not find any streets open to the other side of town.  We called our friends where we had gone by the day before and they said they had sandbagged late into the night and were just watching it for now and did not need any help.  The pictures were all taken of areas in town where you would not see water normally.  Flooding closed several businesses in town but very few were damaged.  In 1978 Austin had two 100 years floods two weeks apart and it seems like that has been happening every couple of years since.  The flood controls put in place the last several years have helped reduce the amount of flooding in some areas.  This week Austin received $5 million to build berms and flood walls so hopefully we have seen the last of the floods in Austin.

The white building is the back of a gas station surrounded by water.

A park that used to be housing but flooded too often.

Jordan's Backyard about six inches higher than their basement floor.

There is normally a small pond for ice skating in front of the building

Off in the distance is the band shell

The band shell normally no water to be seen as the river is across the road behind it and much lower.


2 comments:

Heather said...

That's crazy. Randy said "yep yep" and since I'm from Utah I said again "THAT's CRAZY!"

Renee Anderson said...

Our Owatonna office is under water. The police will not let us near the place, but we are hoping tomarrow they will change their minds. When I called our insurance company, she said NO! NO FLOOD INSURANCE! I said you didn't have to say it so harshly, then she kind of apologized!
I said what is it about not being able to get flood insurance and she said "If people are foolish enough to have a place near water we won't insure them!"