Mudslides 2010

If you follow me on Facebook, I talked all about the mudslides that happened in the city of Highland on December 22nd. Altogether we had 6 straight days of rain, 20 inches of rain, and our hills just...melted...for lack of better word! They wreaked havoc on my poor city! Such a shocker too because the city of Highland is divided into 2 parts : East and West. The East side (where I live) is located on a very large hill. How does a hill flood, right? The water should just run right by...but that was what caused the problem: all that water (and mud) running by, leaving tons of mud and debris as it went. Of course the worst part is where it stopped: at the bottom of the hill. Those poor people had several feet of mud in and around their homes. Most of those homes are clear of mud, but the damage has been done and most of their homes are condemned. The city, nearly 2 months later, is still cleaning things up. We had mud piled like snow banks, mud banks if you will, piled on the sides of the road and least a foot high! They even brought out inmates (you know, like from prisons! ah!) to dig us out. The first couple of days after the slides there would be 'chain gangs' of inmates in orange jumpsuits, chained together by their ankles, digging and filling sand bags. Kind of creepy if you ask me, but I guess that is a smart use of free labor.
The severity of the exact moment the slides were happening were never really apparent to us, it was the aftermath where we were like "wha?? I didn't know it was that bad!" The morning of the 22nd, was our last day before Christmas vacation. I was home sick with pink eye at the time, but Jason got up and got ready for work like normal, went to kiss me good bye and opened the garage door to leave...except there was a river of mud going down the road! So he woke me up and told me that it was raining so hard that our street looked like a river. I jumped up and looked at it for a while before grabbing my camera. I look at these pictures and I think the worst of it had just passed before I got the camera because you can see a visible strip of black road in the middle of the street, which wasn't visible when I first came out to see the commotion. And to see cars, BIG cars, try to drive through it really struggle was kind of shocking. My street is on a fairly steep hill, so it was surprising to see so much water and mud rush by and so fast! I even got video of it, scroll down to see that. Click on any of the pictures to see them better. These were all taken from my front door.

A few days after Christmas, when it was sunny again, we went for a short walk to see the areas that were most affected around our house, places we walk to most often. Like the pool...oh man. Our poor pool. Fences flattened and mud just poured in. We watched the guys trying to work on clearing it. There was so much mud in the pool that they could drive right on top of it like it was flat with the cement around it. I heard it was like pushing pudding around. Here are some pictures from our walk:

This is the bridge over the creek, I love this bridge. As you can see the sidewalk trail that is normally beautifully landscaped along the edges is over run with mud several inches thick. There was a fire fighter hiding behind a tree that I didn't see until after I snapped the picture. He made us leave this area, said it was 'unstable' ground. We listened :)



A picture of how thick the mud is...

Our tennis courts covered in at least a foot of mud...

The clean up crews in what is supposed to be a parking lot. Now its parking lot covered in mud.

This bulldozer thingy is driving on top of the mud that is in the pool. See the pool ladder? This is a pretty big pool too. Filled to the brim with mud! They removed the fences but at first you could see the green fencing in the background used to go all the way around the pool- until the mud flattened it.

All around, even today, then you look at the hills above my city you see what looks like...scrapes...its the only way I can think to describe them. The literally cover the mountains just the way burned areas look, just like scars all over the hills. Its an amazing sight to see when you stand back and look at all of them. That's a lot of mud!

Heres a video of that morning. We thought it was an amazing sight, but at the time we didn't know the damage it was doing to places all around us.