Little rain with big consequences

As I was writing the previous blog post a violent storm came up. Even though I only got two-tenths inch of rain, it is obvious upstream somewhere got a great deal more. The west arroyo ran for over two hours. The big cement tank topped off and the wildlife pond filled up.

AND, the big cottonwood tree blew over. I did say violent storm, didn't I? But I knew that tree would blow over sooner or later, and dreaded the damage it would do. Our prevailing winds are from the northeast. Luckily, the wind that blew it over came from the southeast. I couldn't have guided it better if I had been there. It fell into the path to the arroyo and did very minimal damage. Whew! I had no idea which way the wind came from. I stayed indoors during the storm because the lightning was deafening and on target. Afterwards, as I was driving to the oasis, I saw the tree missing and was dreading confronting the damage. So I was greatly relieved.

There wasn't enough runoff to make it all the way into the stucco tank. Almost though!

So I rigged up my new pump and helped some of the water make it in.

Tomorrow I'll rig up a way to get the water from the upper settling pond (photo below) to this tank.  Normally, the dirt tanks fill up and I top the above tank off with that water, but the dirt tanks didn't catch any water today. I'm not set up to pump water all the way from the upper settling pond to the stucco tank without doing a couple hours of rigging. To be continued....

Going over upper dam towards center & into wildlife pond far right