I'm hoping we're through this, but there is still the issue of rising rivers, full reservoirs pushing up against old dams and washed out bridges and roads.

We were evacuated for a night when there was a dam upstream from us that looked like it would go. Thankfully, it didn't, and I was never so happy to see my little house again.

We just got pounded by constant rain for four days...we got nearly 28 inches of rain where I live. Yikes.

A

I pay flood insurance, but am not in the same kind of flood zone as many of the houses on the news. Our flooding in the past was marginal, and was due to a poorly constructed bridge and road nearby. They have since been fixed. The FEMA folks are slow to catch up with this and so we pay for the insurance still. My house is stone and brick, so isn't one that you would see drifting downstream if it were in one of those flat flooded places.

My grass is growing great guns, and I've planted some trees this week because of all of the moisture, but we have cumulative only a few inches, not the several feet of rain like down in Hill Country. I'm on the southern side of Fort Worth in an enclave called Edgecliff Village. Our Sycamore Creek is a tributary of the Trinity River, but we're up in the bluffs around the Trinity floodplane.

See my creek here. The red "x" that results from this Mapblast search is on the bridge and roadway I mentioned. I'm on this creek. (And if you're wondering, as close as the highway is, we don't hear it much, especially this time of year with the trees leafed out).

The Guadalupe River (Kerrville conversation) is famous for its floods and the deaths that often result. It is a beautiful river and easy to understand the temptation to live near it. I read the most amazing newspaper story about a dozen years ago, but never found a followup. A church camp bus and van were inundated as they traveled on the road that runs beside the Guadalupe. Several children died in the river, but one teenaged boy who was rescued told of being washed into a tangle of trunks and branches in the middle of the river. There was a buck with a large rack tangled in the same island of branches, and the boy worked his way over and pulled the deer's antlers loose. He held on for dear life to the buck and it swam ashore with him on its neck. In the interview with survivors it was an entirely credible part of the story, but no one ever followed up on it. What great material for a children's story--or folk song. Is it one that has already been told somewhere?

Maggie