Higher ground
Dwelling in flood-prone areas as climate disasters increase.
We live in a swamp.
It’s not a swamp anymore, but it used to be an ancient shallow swamp or lakebed. The settlers of 1921 chose the only open, treeless ground for a homesite. But building wasn’t easy, especially when it came time for drainage.
The original house sat on timbers. Later it was raised and a concrete “ring” now supports the original part of the house. At some point, they decided to add an extension and basement to part of the house but hit water-logged soil about six feet down. Solution? Stop digging and quickly pour a basement floor and walls.
The owners added a sump hole, which was originally a well right in the house: no more hauling water. The sump hole/well provided a steady supply of water, but there was another problem – the drainage field. Adding indoor plumbing meant that a septic tank was necessary, using a straight pipe out to the hayfield. Unfortunately, the hayfield was saturated for part of the year and the water began to taste funny when it came from the basement well.
Solution? Add a drainage field and get water elsewhere. Another friend, the late Arnie B., later bought the house and found a spring of relatively clean water (not much iron or manganese, the banes of water in these parts, partly because all your white clothing turns yellow-orange and even your hair may get a free tint).
Arnie filled the old well in the basement (14 feet below the surface) with small, smooth rocks. He found plenty in his fields! Then he installed a sump pump, and that worked to keep the basement free of water most of the time.
For us, the new owners since 1990, the basement did pose problems for the first few years, but now we have figured out how to coordinate pumps, heating cables on the roofs, a drainage tile around the living room, and so on. The basement is dry. Fingers crossed.
Low-lying areas
Why all these details? Because, if we were to experience massive rain events such as those produced by hurricanes or heavy downpours, our basement would flood. We could handle that with the sump pump, using a portable generator if the power goes out. Though it’s not useful or fair to criticize the Swifts or other pioneers who did what they could to get established, our house should have been all built above ground or on other higher ground on the farm. That doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting that people anywhere deserve catastrophes, nor that The Netherlands should be relocated. People in the past acted in ways that seemed best at the time. Similarly, pioneers in prairie country sometimes built on the floodplains or creeks, lakes or rivers. Made sense then and still some sense now. But with wildly fluctuating water levels, an unstable climate, massive storms and hurricanes, it sounds to me more and more that it would not be an overreach for governing authorities to restrict and “grandfather out” houses in many of these low-lying locations.
Pray for those suffering from floods, pray that rebuilding efforts take the current state of weather and climate into account, and pray for people whose dwellings may have to be rebuilt a distance away from flood-prone areas.
