flooding and curling

so remember how we irrigated on Tuesday, and how Michael was in charge of the water from dark until 7am...well I had a really interesting day yesterday.

Michael had a big day at work, so we tag-teamed again, and I was supposed to stay home in the morning to wait for our vet to come check out the new baby. When he left at 7:30, I went and fed the animals. When I came back into the house 5 minutes later I heard a panicked voice on the answering machine saying "6 inches of water in my barn, and I can't even open the barn doors to get my animals out, could you check your dams and please call me...". shit. so I called up the neighbor who was supposed to take the water over at 9am and said "take it, take it now!" and called the neighbor who's brand new barn we had flooded to say that I'd check on the dams and see what I could do.

The vet came (yay Dr. Tim) and checked out the new baby and got a blood sample to send off to test for the dreaded bvdv. Then I trecked out into the pasture to see what was going on. Oh, yes, there was clearly a problem. There was so much water that it was flowing off the end of our property and making a straight path down the small slope to the neighbor's barn. I checked the dams in a few places, built one new mud dam to hold back some of the water flow from one ditch, and across the property line I created a new pseudo dam/earth wall/new ditch by digging the heavy clay mud. While I was doing this, I could see my neighbor at her barn, and I asked her if I could help her out...

so I went to my neighbor's barn where I learned that we got lucky that we didn't electrocute their horses. There were several inches of standing water in the barn, and in the middle of the barn was a fan that was plugged in (partly submerged). She said that when she did get the barn doors open, she saw that the fan was still on even though it was partly underwater.

So I helped her move her stack of hay bales, the pallets the hay was on, the bags of stall bedding that were soaked, and then worked on getting the water out of the barn by using a push broom to force the water out. After we got the bulk of the water out, she pulled out the hose with the high-pressure nozzle and as she sprayed the stall-mat covered floor to get rid of the layer of silt/mud, I pushed the water along. Let me tell you, the center of their barn was the low spot, so it was like pushing water up from the center of a bowl...you need a lot of momentum to really get it up over the lip.

So their barn got clean, their animals didn't die, and there was only a small amount of damage to the hay and bedding. And I got a new appreciation for Olympic curlers. (my whole back is SO sore today)

I'm heading up to Estes Park to assist the fleece judging for the wool market. I'll be up there all day today and tomorrow...more farm tales to come.