Summer Hiatus: Tornado and Drought

After a long summer hiatus, I am back to the blogosphere (cheer here)! It was an eventful season, with two of the highlights being an F1 tornado that swept through our village, and  a garden-killing drought (not to mention that a tree also fell on our garden…) Mostly, it was hot, hot, hot.

To those of you living in Tornado Alley,  an F1 might not seem so bad. But to a girl who has only experienced the occasional violent summer storm or North Atlantic nor’easter, this was significant.

There had been a severe thunderstorm warning issued by Environment Canada, and my daughter and I were on the front porch breathing in the cool relief of wind, and the beginning spatterings of rain. We were rejoicing; we had been praying for rain.

As the wind increased, we hunkered against the side of the house, shivering and smiling. Limbs bent low, and rain danced a foot off the ground. We marvelled at the noise of wind in leaves and water on ground.

Suddenly, a gust of wind hit and did not stop. The air turned white, raindrops breaking. Branches flew horizontally across my field of vision, and we made a hasty retreat to our safe place inside.

It lasted only a moment, but what a lot of damage!

This canopy was only days old.

Amazingly, the noise of the wind muffled any sound of the gigantic trees snapping. And snap they did, all over town.

We sustained only damage to our garden, which is an incredible blessing considering we have some of the largest maple trees in town (that remained intact).

 

 

 

 

 

 

It didn’t take long to meet the neighbours. Everybody surveyed damage, knocked on doors, said “did you know…” and tiptoed around live wires.

 

 

And the heat, intense heat, humid and 100% still air, was worse than before. The sun sizzled that afternoon.

 

 

 

 

 

There was no electricity, no air conditioning, no water.

We never had water from our well again.

Unbeknownst to us, the well had been in its dying days, and the lack of pressure/suction from the idle pump was enough to make the water table drop away.

We had no water for 8 days, showered at friends’ or the YMCA, did laundry at friends’ who were on vacation, flushed toilets and washed dishes via a garden hose from our neighbour’s tap attached to our plumbing.

Well, let’s try here! The first thing was to find the old one…

We dug up the yard to FIND the old well, to see if it was a foot valve issue, but alas, there was not a drop to be found. There wasn’t even mud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The well cover, and a trench where the path used to be. Who knew what had filtered down into our drinking water in all this time?

To make a long story short, we drilled a new well, and the water is better than ever! Cold and clean, and lots of it. What a relief!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 4 hours, mostly through solid limestone bedrock, we had a new 102′ foot well with lots of good water pressure.

A friend posted on Facebook that it sounded like “Little House on the Prairie” over here!

So that is a bit about my summer. How was yours?

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