Our place flooded

[TexasJerseyMilker]

I don't know where to put this but Pastures and Grass dept.

We live in Oregon and fortunately our house is on a bluff. The South Coquille river is off to the side. In the last 2 days it rained 7".

Usually it looks like this. This is pasture 2 and beyond is pasture 3.


This is what we woke up to. Note rain gauge.


A short time later.


Then about 2 hours later


That pointy green thing is our kayak tied to the top of a fence post. Amazingly it did not wash away.


The horses decided to go out there on their own. Dinky the pony had to swim back.


The horses decided to seek higher ground. You can see pasture 3 in the background filling up/


Eventually pasture 3 beyond the creek flooded too and we had to evacuate the Jersey heifers to a property across the road They spent the night tied to trees and were fed hay. This morning we walked them back. It's a good thing they are tame heifers.

This was the view from the kitchen.

 

[A.J.]

I'm glad you all and the critters were ok. I hope the water recedes soon without too much damage.

 

[TexasJerseyMilker]

This morning the river had gone back to bed and the sun is out Just a few ponds are left in the pastures. This is bottom land with flood terraces but I've never seen it flood within the last 5 years we lived here. Well, yesterday the river re-fertilized all the terraces like the Nile delta. Theres muck down there about 10" deep. I walked all the fence lines. Smallish trees fell on the cattle panel fences in several places but they held up and can easily be fixed. And, I didn't have to go swimming while shifting livestock.

 

[Travlr]

I don't know where to put this but Pastures and Grass dept.

We live in Oregon and fortunately our house is on a bluff. The South Coquille river is off to the side. In the last 2 days it rained 7".

It usually looks like this. It's pasture 2 and beyond is pasture 3.
View attachment 55882

This is what we woke up to. Note rain gauge.
View attachment 55881

A short time later.
View attachment 55885
Then

about 2 hours later
View attachment 55887View attachment 55888

That pointy green thing is our kayak tied to the top of a fence post. Amazingly it did not wash away.
View attachment 55889

The horses decided to go out there on their own. Dinky the pony had to swim back.
View attachment 55890

Eventually pasture 3 beyond the creek flooded too and we had to evacuate the Jersey heifers across the road. They spent the night tied to trees and fed hay. This morning we walked them back. It's a good thing they are tame heifers.

This was the view from the kitchen.
View attachment 55892
View attachment 55893

Holy crappy... That's a lot of water. Do you have access to a road that goes anywhere?

Funny that all your animals graze in the same spot.

 

[TexasJerseyMilker]

They graze in 3 spots. The first unflooded picture is one of my 2 dairy cows. Those live in pasture 1 which is on the same level as our house. Right now pasture 2 is a bottom land horse pasture and it flooded bad. Pasture 3 is where I keep my yearling heifers and water was rising fast so we got them out of there. There is a public road, actually a windy two lane state highway that runs along the other side. But too muddy and water too high at the gate to load them in the trailer so we led them out on lead ropes. One of them was in heat too. what fun.

 

[TexasJerseyMilker]

It was quite a thing to wake up to. It rained hard all night, then at dawn, Surprise! Since nothing bad happened looking back at it, it was kind of challenging and fun. The awesome invincible power of nature and water, wow.

Really the only creature on the place that had a normal day was that 2 week old calf in the barn. I came in soaking wet with her bottle. Up she stands in the straw in her pink calf coat, tongue sticking out and hunting for milk. What a blessing.

The river is the South Coquille. The Coquille has three branches flowing out of the southern Coast range of Coos county in SW Oregon. The mountains catch the rain clouds, they rise and drop their rain. Last year it rained 69", that's 5 and 3/4 feet in my rain gauge. But usually not all at once like this. The higher mountains here sometimes gets some snow. Then it rains on the snow and it all flows down at once. The main stem of the Coquille flows through a vast verdant valley that floods every year called the Winter Lakes. When it drains off and turns green in the spring it is covered with grazing cattle as far as the eye can see. Around the edge up where the hills start to rise there are dairies. There used to be many but the small ones closed. In the old days the dairies used to haul their milk out on docks in big cans. They put it on boats that took it down the Coquille to the coastal cheese factories.

There is still an operating cheese factory in Bandon that sells to the public and does a good business. The store has big windows where you can look in and see them cutting big trays of curd and making giant batches of cheese. The operator of an organic dairy told me that tank trucks bring the milk to the factory and then they pump the whey back into the truck. It brings it back to the dairy and they spray it on the fields for fertilizer.

 

[Dave]

We had a storm hit by the mouth of the Columbia in 2007. They clocked the winds at 160MPH at the mouth of the river until the buoy broke loose. The Willipa hills had a couple of feet of wet snow. The storm dropped 14 inches of rain in a day. The Chehalis River headwaters are in the Willipa hills. It ran across the south side of my pasture. At the height of the flood the river was running over 90,000 cubic feet a second. The river was about a mile wide at my place. Of the 250 +/- acres there was about an acre where my house sat that was dry.

 

[TexasJerseyMilker]

Dang.

This is where our house is. Sometimes that weather vane needs to be straightened

 

[TexasJerseyMilker]

My AI guy told me a lot of cattle were lost on the main stem of the Coquille and also the upper branches. Some turned up somewhere else but many drowned from swimming and being caught on fences.

 

[TexasJerseyMilker]

The dairies here are all free stall and kept indoors above high water. These were beef cows that were lost.

My AI guy told me of a flood that had come years ago when there was when 48" fell. He had a set of 20 registered Jersey heavy springers due within a month. He put out a (fake) electric fence to keep them near the barn that night. Next morning they we all gone and water as far as the eye could see. A big loss to him. So he went to his mom's place 1/4 miles away to feed some young heifers he had there, the, the same place his bred heifers had been raised. Pouring the sound of feed into the trough his heavy springers heard this and came all 20 come swimming to feed. all were accounted for/

 

[4hfarms]

The dairies here are all free stall and kept indoors above high water. These were beef cows that were lost.

My AI guy told me of a flood that had come years ago when there was when 48" fell. He had a set of 20 registered Jersey heavy springers due within a month. He put out a (fake) electric fence to keep them near the barn that night. Next morning they we all gone and water as far as the eye could see. A big loss to him. So he went to his mom's place 1/4 miles away to feed some young heifers he had there, the, the same place his bred heifers had been raised. Pouring the sound of feed into the trough his heavy springers heard this and came all 20 come swimming to feed. all were accounted for/

Awesome!. Says a thing or two about bucket training.
That was the best possible outcome.

 

[Dave]

My AI guy told me a lot of cattle were lost on the main stem of the Coquille and also the upper branches. Some turned up somewhere else but many drowned from swimming and being caught on fences.

That flood here in 2007 they lost hundreds of dairy cows. The water came up so fast they couldn't get them out of the free stall barns. I know one man who was trying to push the cows out of the barn. They wouldn't go. He only got about a dozen out, they all survived. The water got high enough that he had to get out. All those left in the barn died. How we didn't lose people is a minor miracle.