Shellpot Creek just starting to fill up from the rain - video

Shellpot Creek is only just getting started today. If Tropical Storm Nicole drops the 2 to 4 inches expected then this creek will rise higher.



The rain will be good to flush out the creek anyway. We just don't need a flood of the backyard like earlier in the summer.

Fascinating archeological finds left by the flooding Shellpot Creek

I finally got around to cleaning up some of the junk (archaeological finds) floated in the backyard by the rising and then receding waters of the Shellpot Creek. There was a ton of styrofoam that I wanted to get what I could of, and an assortment of other interesting things.

A sampling of the most strange things I collected is shown in the art project photo above.

• Enough styrofoam to create my own garbage pile in the Pacific gyre. Please carefully dispose of styrofoam in the trash or recycle in the entire Shellpot Creek watershed (.pdf link) as a favor to me.
• Plastic soda and water bottles, a scourge on the landscape if ever there was one.
• Several sizes of containers which once carried alcohol.
• A piece of a pool noodle
• Foam padding for a helmet, I can only imagine when the helmet will float by.
• And eroded sole of a flip flop of some sort.
• A fisher price bat. I am keeping that one for Linus.
• A light bulb
• A scoured clean tennis ball
• A Christmas ornament

The only reason the Christmas ball survived is that it is plastic, and in fact the side away from the sun remained blue while the exposed side faded to silver.

There was larger stuff in the creek.

The piece of siding and the bucket lids were actually down in the creek, but they were so obvious I had to go get them and throw them in the trash, before they were carried away in the next storm.

Shellpot Creek Watershed.

Overflowing Shellpot Creek video and photos from todays monsoon

For the first time since we have lived in this house, Shellpot Creek lept its banks and flooded portions of the backyard.

The waterfall is an almost flat raging, rushing torrent.

A view of the flooded backyard from an upstairs window.

Just as dramatic was that it couldn't drain fast enough in front of the house.


The creek flows from the cul-de-sac...

...down the street.

Technically, for a short period this afternoon, our house was on an island in the middle of Shellpot creek as the creek flowed down Stoney Creek Lane in front of the house and joined the main branch further upstream, even as it flooded from its usual location in the back of the house.

Here is a video showing the creek first beginning to leave its banks.



Here is a video showing the height of the flooding of the backyard.



There was really no damage except some lost mulch that had just been put down, perhaps some plants were swept away and the regular creek junk left in our yard instead of high in the creek bed. You can see the creek is so high that the waves from the creek just crash across the yard. I also watched as large logs and debris from the creek floated through my yard and under the fence to the neighbors (and hopefully back to the creek so they don't have to deal with it).

It was a dramatic flooding event, but the house suffered no damage whatsoever since it sits high on the lot.

UPDATE: Charts from the the USGS stream gage on Shellpot Creek. This gage is downstream from my house, but since the water at my house, plus some more goes through the gage, it is a useful, official measurement of the creek flow.

The discharge in cubic feet per second. You can see July 13th's morning rain, July 14th's morning rain, and the high peak of the flood recorded in this post. Note that the scale is a log scale, so the peak at 3100 cuft/s at 2:35pm on 7-14-2010 is 50% more than the 2130 cuft/s at 6:45am on 7-13-2010.

The gage height. Gage height is a linear scale.

At least now I know that ~3000 cu ft/ second and a gage height of ~7.5 ft means water in the backyard.

Water shooting out of drain next to Shellpot Creek

This manhole cover had water shooting out of it today due to the large amount of rainfall. It is right next to Shellpot Creek at the lowest part of the valley so I can see why water might be under some pressure when it finally gets there.

UPDATE (3-21-2010): Apparently water shooting out of the manhole cover means that it is broken. That week we saw crews examining the manhole cover and apparently they replaced it and its cement collar and everything.

Above is the new cover.