Shellpot Creek rises after yesterday's torrential downpours

Yesterday's rain rapidly filled Shellpot creek in the morning.  Here is a picture.

It's back to normal now, but it is always exciting to see and hear it.

Video of White heron Flying around Shellpot Creek

Finally caught video of a White Heron flying around our section of Shellpot Creek north of Wilmington, Delaware. I fell a little bad following it around to get the video because it finally flew onto the roof and then downstream to feed because of me.



Up on the roof of our house.

Hopefully it will come back some day when I am not around to bother it and eat some tasty fish in our section of the creek.

Blue Heron on Shellpot Creek

Saw the Blue Heron on Shellpot creek this morning. Pictures are pretty good, but still no video.




I tried to switch to the iPhone and slightly bumped the blind on the window and it flew away. That noise couldn't have been heard by the bionic woman yet it spooked that bird.

Snow pictures of the day with all precipitation types

There has been a lot of complaint that the weather forecasters missed the call on this recent storm. It started yesterday when we awoke to 4 inches of snow that was twice what anybody expected and was still snowing when we all thought it would turn to rain.

We had in sequence - snow, cloudy skies, rain, ice pellets and lots of snow again. My pictures begin in the middle with the measurement of last night's snow, which was the second wave. About 7.5 inches.

Linus confirmed my measurement later in the shoveling. You can see my little meteorologist at work.

Then I got crazed with power after I finished shovelling the driveway. "

Look on my mighty snowpile ye snowflakes and despair. Fear my mighty shovel of power."

This has happened before.


Here is the pillowy snow covered rocks on Shellpot Creek.


The required waterfall picture.


And a closeup of the water flowing. The creek has actually risen above the earlier level where it froze so the water is flowing over ice stuck to the rocks.


A closeup of the water at the base of the waterfall.

First snow of 2011 - pictures and a car in a ditch

The first snowfall of the year in Delaware puts more than 2 inches of snow on the ground. Here is a measurement showing 2.5 inches. Use the right hand side of the ruler for measuring, this is a measuring square and the left hand side starts at the top of the "L" part of it.


Because it happened at night and into this morning and it wasn't expected to be much there hasn't been any plowing on our street or the streets in the neighborhood around us. That probably led to this person going down the hill on Baynard from Shipley to Marsh too fast and ending up in the ditch just before the Shellpot Creek bridge. There was no one in the car and folks on the scene said the person had gotten out already and was OK.

Shellpot Creek always looks nice after a good snow.




The snow on the driveway might actually need to be shoveled!

Before and After - Shoveling Panoramas

The view out of the garage before (click picture for panorama) ...


...and after shoveling (click picture for panorama).


It was only 5 inches on the driveway as I measured it.


So it wasn't as dramatic as farther east but it looks real pretty. Today's winds were powerful and rattled the house. Some children lost a ball onto the frozen Shellpot Creek, probably because of the wind.

It made it down the creek to our section and they fished it out safely.

Boxing Day snow photos

It's going to snow for a long time today and tonight and we are supposed to end with 12 inches. Here are some starting photos of the excitement.


Shellpot Creek downstream.

Shellpot Creek Waterfall.


The lonely snowy swingset.

More to come.

Toad Lily on the Shellpot Creek

I thought I had lost this toad lily twice this year due to Shellpot Creek flooding and overflowing its banks. It seems to have done just fine and has some pretty wildly spotted flowers.

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.

Measuring Shellpot Creek Stream Flow with a Leaf

Before today's rain, the Shellpot Creek has been so low due to the lack of rain that it has contracted down to flowing through a few inch wide cleft in the rocks on the stream bed in the middle of the picture below.

Here is the cleft:

The width is about 3.25 inches:


The depth is 2 inches, the ruler I used goes to 16 inches on the right side and 14 inches is just visible below.


I realized that such a controlled situation would allow me to measure the stream flow with a ruler and something like a leaf floating in the water to get the flow velocity of the surface. I used my camera and flip video to capture the measurements and as a timer for the flow. I repositioned the ruler and used an imaginary line drawn from the cleft in the rock to the ruler edge. This distance is 5.25 inches. I then used the flip video snapshot function to find the exact frame the leaf first crosses the imaginary line at the cleft in the rock and the exact frame the leaf just touches the ruler at the other end (leaf and red lines below).


There are 30 frames/second in the video. I got 10 successful measurements from 14 leaf drops, ranging from 23 frames to 40 frames, corresponding to an average of 5.59 inches/second +/s 15% for the velocity of the leaf and thus for the velocity of the top of the water.

I pieced them all together in the following video.

Without doing the extra work that would be required given the fluid mechanics of the situation we are going to assume that the channel is rectangular and that I have measured the maximum velocity of the fluid. That corresponds to the right hand side of the chart below.

If we assume a linear velocity profile the average velocity is 5.59 inches/sec multiplied by a 2 inch depth and a 3.25 in width to get 36.3 cubic inches/sec for the flow. In reality the velocity profile is more parabolic like the right hand side of the diagram above and the average velocity is higher. Also, the channel is not smooth on the sides or the bottom, because of pebbles and stones and even the cross section will not be regular. Close examination of the video of the leaves floating by shows that they often go fast on the right hand side of the flow of the creek and slower on the left hand side, giving another clue that the velocity profile isn't simple.

Thus I feel like I have measured more of a lower bound for the flowrate. What would my readers do differently?

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.

More video of the raging Shellpot Creek

Watch the large branch go under just above the waterfall at the beginning of the video. There were many large logs going by. Just as long as they keep going by and don't get stuck on my part of the creek.

Video of Raging Shellpot Creek

The creek is roaring today.

More Northern Water Snakes on Shellpot Creek

This has been a banner year (five at once, in the mulch) for Northern Water Snakes in my yard on the edge of Shellpot Creek north of Wilmington. I took a picture of this one basking in the grass next to the driveway yesterday.

I took a video of it as it slithered away to hide under the hostas. Perhaps it doesn't like the attention.

The snakes seem to come out on cool but sunny days and particularly enjoy a rock with many nooks and crannies which is next to the creek but in the sun. I have officially names the rock, Snake Rock, because there has rarely been a time during a sunny day when I have gone over there and not spotted a snake sunning itself on the rock or visible in a cranny in the rock. yesterday I had to stop two neighborhood girls from stepping on one. The kids use the rocks along the creek as a path but these two were completely unaware that there were snakes a few feet from them. I asked them to stop and then warned them. They were calm and then they decided to walk in the yard to get around the snakes.

I don't mind the snakes as I assume they eat mice and moles, which do need to be controlled in my yard, I just don't want to surprise one and get bitten, or worse, have Linus get bitten.

Panorama of the Shellpot Creek

Last week while cleaning out some of the gutters for Spring, I took my camera with me up to the roof and took many photos of the Shellpot Creek from up the creek to down the creek. I used Hugin to stitch them together in a panorama and now you can look up and down the creek from the same vantage point as I did, click the photo for larger.

I suppose the best view of the Shellpot Creek is from the roof on that corner of the house. Maybe some day we will build a deck up there.

update: The twitpic version is larger. I guess Blogger compresses the size somewhat.

Five snakes on the Shellpot Creek

We gave some rocks by the creek that appear to have a den of Northern Water snakes in them. I assume it is because the rocks get warm in the sun and that is how the snakes get warm on an otherwise windy spring day.

See if you can count how many are in this cleft in the rocks.

This close up (click on the picture for larger) shows at least four heads ( two at the top, one hard to see in the middle, and one at the bottom) though I think there may be more.

Don't forget to include the one that was hiding under the leaves next to the rocks, see its scaly skin in the middle of the picture below.


And one I don't have a picture of in the crack on top of the rocks. Needless to say if I go near these rocks I wear boots and shuffle my feet to give them warning to get away. I only creep quietly to take pictures. I don't remember this many Norther Water Snakes in any other year, perhaps I wasn't paying attention.

Is this a den where the snakes hatched or just a bunch of them overwintering and finally waking up for the Spring? As always a herpetologists opinion would be welcome.

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.

The snow is melting slowly - Shellpot creek goes up and down

The USGS has a hydrological station on Shellpot Creek in Delaware near Wilmington down stream from my area of the creek. I have noticed the creek rising during the day the last few days. But don;t just take my word for it. Here is the chart from the station.

Up, as the snow melts during the day, and down, as the melting slows. It is interesting that the stream lags the day. I suppose the sun has to rise and melt some snow and the water must travel to the creek before it registers, and the warm part of the day isn't even getting started until noon or later. It is supposed to rain this week, so that will obliterate this nice chart. Add to the rain the snow melt that will accompany it and this might be a high creek week.

Snow pictures #7 A sneak peek at Shellpot Creek

I know that pictures of a snow covered Shellpot Creek water fall are very common this year, but it is amazing how much snow is piled on these rocks. This looks more like some snowy mountain stream, than a creek in Delaware.

Upstream from the waterfall.

Top of the water fall.

The waterfall.


Base of the water fall.


Downstream of the waterfall.