HOw did they clean up after a flood in old days?

[2manyrocks]

Some of the folks I know who got wet in Nashville built their houses across the street from the river. There was one family that had the land and then sold lots off to mutual friends, and I think all of them ended up with their houses under water. It's a beautiful area--so long as the river doesn't rise.

 

[user.69169]

Well now Mr Bird, I'll just begin by suggesting you read this here article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/nyregion/06flood.html

The young fellow I spoke of was trying to buy a house in the town of Gates, and you'll notice that is referred to in that article.
Seems the screwup on the governments part is so serious no less a man than Senator Scummer himself stuck his nose into looking at the mess and says the government screwed up.
You'll also note that the article pretty clearly points out no bank or mortgage company in NY will come close to a mortgage in NY where there is a possibility of flooding without flood insurance. Things might be different where you hang your hat, but NY has more dang lawyers than a herd of skeeters fresh from hatching, and every one of them is looking to suck blood. You can't buy a piece of property hereabouts without 5 lawyers getting in on the act, not to mention a surveyor or 2. All the lawyers seem to suffer from some brain disorder that makes em think the earth and every house around here is moving when it gets dark, and unless 2 surveyors tell the lawyers the house ain't moved ain't no sale happening.

If you were to bring up one of them hill and valley maps showing the house that fellow was trying to buy you'd see the house sits on the side of a hill, and little more than half a mile to the north runs the Erie Canal in a 50 foot deep cut through stone. I sure ain't an engineer, but seems to me till that canal fills up full and stops carrying water off ain't no way that house is going to get wet. Like I was saying we got way too many of these so called professional people running loose making trouble for other people. Seems like they got them diplomas and licenses they all have and that gives them a right to eat steak while the man working for a living is lucky to be getting hamburger helper without the burger.

Couple things I can tell for sure about water, it's gonna come and ain't much man can do to stop it when its on the way. Of course a lot of people all around the world figured that pretty much out long ago and the smart ones figured out how to work together with Mother Nature and benefit from that water.

Second house mom & dad built back when I was a boy was a pretty good example of that working with nature. Dad built the place up off the ground on concrete blocks, and put empty oil drums all coated with tar under the house. He had about 10 4" square wood posts in the walls that went through the floor and slid down when he pulled a nail out of each one. He figured if the place ever flooded he'd just let the water lift the house up, and he'd drop the posts to hold the house up when the water drained back off. Then all we had to do was get under that place with a bunch of concrete blocks and build up the foundation piers. Some folks said he was out of his mind, but sure as shooting that water came and up went the house. Dad might not have had a whole lot of schooling, but his idea worked, and our house was 5 feet higher than when it started. Didn't take no work to get it up there and us kids scooted them concrete blocks in there real easy dragging em on old tin signs from beside the road. Us kids thought it was a whole lot of fun doing that job of work. Dad had drawn them signs home when the Parish road crew went out and ripped em down. They were glad not to have to haul them signs back to the highway, and we used every one of them for something.

Like I was saying before, people just don't seem to think much any more. I ain't absolutely certain, but I got a dang good hunch people's brains have rotted from watching too much TV. I'm glad we didn't have no TV when I was a kid, shoot we didn't even have electric till my little brother dragged home a generator in the late 60s. Onliest TV I ever saw running when I was growing up was in a store window when we went to town to do shopping.
Just the other week I was watching some fix your house program where a fellow spent a couple thousand dollars to put a rainwater catcher in under his back porch to save on buying water for his plants. Fellow stood there looking all impressed while this TV star fellow hooked the contraption up, and I'm sitting here thinking that ain't nothing but a water bed mattress. I can pick them suckers up for free every year when the college kids leave town and abandon their posessions cause they are too lazy to take them home.

I've talked to more than one of them fancy educated fellows and gals too, and truth is they don't seem very smart to me. I went in the feed store a while back and there was 3 of them working there. Some lady bought 4 bags of corn $3.25 a bag, and they couldn't figure out how much to charge cause the bags didn't have that little bunch of pencil lines on a strip and the computer wouldn't ring it up. I just stood there and said 13 bucks. Kid asks me how I figure, and I tell him 4x3 =12 and 4 quarters = another buck, 12 + 1=13. All 3 of them college kids stand looking like I'm trying to cheat the store or something. Something is bad wrong when the future of the country is in the hands of kids with this little education and they are in college. When I was coming up you dang sure learned everything you could because you never knew when you'd need to know it. Today the kids don't learn a dang thing, they just get passed along to the next class, and when somebody my age trys to give them a bit of learning they get all hostile and go to fighting with us. It's like they know they was cheated by the school and they're mad I wasn't too.

 

[Egon]

In Europe many Buildings alongside a river seem to have all the important things starting from the second story up. First floor is mostly storage.

We live maybe 250 feet from the LaHave River but have a nice elevation gain from the water.

A few years ago an ice jam Resulted in some houses upstream flooding. But they only had maybe seven/eight feet elevation above the normal water level.

 

[Bird]

Well now Mr Bird, I'll just begin by suggesting you read this here article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/nyregion/06flood.html

Very interesting article, (removed), an I appreciate you posting it. I won't get into the right or wrong of what FEMA did, since politics is a prohibited topic on Tractorbynet.

 

[user.69169]

Mr Bird you nor nobody else want to get me goin on them FEMA fellows or politician people either. What that foolishness got to going after that Katrina hurricane was a pure sin to say the least. When I saw that stuff on the TV news I went out and scraped the bumper sticker off my Power Wagon that said course I'm slow I'm from Louisiana. Never before have I been so ashamed of where I came from and I still ain't lived that down.

The sad reality is Mother Nature made that part of the country to handle hurricanes quite nice with all the swamp. Then along came all them real estate developer fellows in the 50s and they went to carvin up floodland and backwater land so they could sell it to folks who had no dang idea and run off with the money. I got some kin over in Florida and them realestate fellows did even worse there when they put in a bunch of poormade streets on flatland and sold lots to folks who necver even looked at the land. Thing is a swamp is a pretty dang well laid out what folks call an ecosystem these days. I've seen a whole army of engineers over my life and have yet to meet one who could do better work than Mother Nature. Their work sure has messed up a lot of nature though and to no good purpose.

Seems like folks been living next to water for as long as time and drawing benefit from the water. Thing is if you're going to do that you have to accept the reality that water moves and rises and falls. You work with the water and the water give you a good living. You try fighting the water and the water will win every time. I drove a lot of this country hauling transformers and I never did figure out why people build a city right there in the flatland between forks of a river and expect it not to flood. Of course if people were smart I only would have driven half the miles, and I sure wouldn't have hauled back waterlogged transformers. I hauled many that they could have saved by just pulling the switch before the water got to them, but nope they left them perfectly good transformers go underwater with the power still on. Then they too stupid to pull the drain plug and let the water out when the water go down. Gotta be too much TV watchin rotted their brains cause I can't think of no other reason.

Now you say "since politics is a prohibited topic on Tractorbynet" and that gets me to wondering, is there any way you can think of to prohibit them politician folks all together? Seems like if that was possible we just might get things going for the better. Well, I can have a dream now and again.

 

[mmurphy]

Here in Iowa I think we have had at least 2 so called 500 year floods since 93! I feel sorry for the people who have to go through them messes. The ones I do not feel sorry for are the ones that build in natural flood zones. If they want to build there they need to build like it will happen, and allow for more then expected. I see some of these people that flood every 5 years around a river, and cry for help and complain how the government or red cross will not help them.

 

[2manyrocks]

Codes probably wouldn't let your Dad build his house so it would float in a flood, today.

And you're correct that kids can't make change without the cash register telling them how.

My friends who built near the river and got flooded are college grads with the exception of one, I think.

One of the ladies in our Sunday school class works for a company that does flood remediation. She said the crews are getting grumpy from all the work in Nashville, but there's no end in sight, yet. I asked her the same question that started this thread, and she didn't have an answer except "bleach?"

 

[user.69169]

2many when we built that house back around 50, I seriously doubt anybody living outside of the citys ever heard of a code, and if they did folks out in the swamps just ignored the code and did what they needed do. You sure never saw anybody from the Parish out there, now that jsut might have been because they didn't want to come someplace they might not find way back from, or might have been because they didn't care. That place was near a mile from the nearest road, and the mailman came by 2-3 times a week in his boat. During the dry season you might not see him for 2 weeks if he had to pole the boat, and in wet times you saw him more often cause he could use his outboard. Mainly I think it was just different times and folks did what they had to and left others do what they needed to. I think yo also gotta understand where I come from people saved up and bought what they could pay for, not go to the bank and borrow money like everybody wants to today. heck, I well remember how you had to know 2 or 3 people with money in the bank to sign the back of a check for you so the banker would cash it if he didn't know the fellow who wrote the check had the money in his account to cover the check. I also remember people who went through the Depression who wouldn't put a penny in the bank. Some small town banks didn't even finish paying back from the Depression till 52 as I recall.

Shoot, when we was kids mom wanted an outside oven so she could bake in summer without the house turning into a oven itself. She had one of them tin box ovens you set over the stove burners on the kerosene stove, kept it when we got the propane stove, and it did the job. She took the idea into her head she wanted an oven like her mom had, and we collected up some bricks and some blocks and when we got them all stacked up us kids built her an oven out behind the house. That was alot of fun making that oven, we figured out how to stick concrete blocks together and stick bricks together, and make a floor in the oven out of claymud and some chainlink fence we found someplace. Seems like it took a couple weeks before it was all plastered up with some special clay Mom's brother brought by and dry enough to build a fire in. It probably wasn't real straight or even level, but us kids built it for her and mom was proud of that oven. First bach of bread she baked was like we died and went to heaven I tell you. A couple years later my sister Zee really took to baking pies and bread and would paddle her boat over to the Parish road and sell her bakegoods. Zee brought back her money and the empty pieplates people brought back and she had quite a business going. Zee might have been the first int he family to have a runin with the Parish when somebody who worked for the Parish got on her for selling on the roadside, but that fellow decided he best let it go when some of her regular customers who worked for the oil company told him he could go swimming.

I think I was working for Gulf when I got my first pay in a check, they had a second window about 6 feet beyond where the lady handed out checks where another cashed your check for you. Stayed that way all the time I was working there too. A mans word was worth a whole lot more than any paper some lawyer drew up too, you said you were doing something you best well do it or by next moon everybody knew yer word was no good, and nobody did anything with you.

You saying that lady from the Church working for the cleanup company not knowing anything but bleach made me laugh. I was down seein one of my kin northof Meterie after that Katrina fiasco about 8 months, and we sat there on the porch laughing all we was worth. They took a good lick, and like you say there was hustlers and trucks all over the place 8 months later. Couple insurance companys had set up housetrailers, and were still working in them 16 hours a day. My kin were saying how this one insurance company bought a bill of goods from some contractor that soda blasting would clean upand stop the mold, and the mold grew back before the contractor got out of town. The insurance guys dang near got themselves burned inside of that housetrailer by people with new mold when tey said they weren't going to do any more to help.

Funny thing was my kin had about a foot of water in his place over the floor, and when the water went down he did things pretty much the way we did back as kids. Course 50 years later he had a industrial vacum cleaner that sucked the slimey mud up, and he followed that with a pressure pump hosing his floor down and then he hauled the rugs out to the lawn and washed them down again. He didn't have no mold either, but he did have to replace the bottom foot or so of his wallboard. When he put the new board up he put sort of a chairrail at the place the new and old met up so if he has to do it again it'll be easier.

In that part of the country you don't even need a flood to get mold growing, spring and summer can make it happen without any extra water. I guess if them fancy contractors want to use bleach they can, ain't my money paying for it. I can tell you though just bleach alone ain't going to do the job. You gotta scrub the dang mud off things first, and nothing I ever ran across works better than Fells Naptha soap for that. Then, if you been living around water for years you go over to the pool store or the warehouse and get yourself some pool clorine and spray that where the slop set. You gota clean under the house too and use clorine there. Stinks for all getout, but it kills the mold. You get right on it as the water goes down and you got a real good chance. If that mold gets started it eats right into the wood and plaster and you never get rid of the mold. That pool clorine is about 10 times stronger than bleach is.

I run across a lot of thrm college grads, and many just want to let me know where they went to school and what degrees they got. They get all upset when I tell them all they learned was what that professor wanted to teach them, and they dang sure didn't learn all the professor knew. Shoot, I got more degrees than they have anyhow, my compass has 360 of them all by itself. There's just too much emphasis on schooling these days and not enough on knowledge. Don't seem to be many who got the wisdom to put the problem up agaisnt the experience in their on board brain and find a solution. That's just what is called progress. Sort of reminds me of the old story of the empiror's new clothes.

 

[mmurphy]

(removed), I won't hit the quote tab but I enjoyed reading your posts. Well I didn't read it all but, you hit the nail on the head from the ones I seen.:thumbsup:

 

[2manyrocks]

So the Mrs. comes in after talking with one of her friends about the local flooding. Story goes that couple A decided to move their stuff out of their business on the Saturday before the river got out of its banks and told another couple B they needed to take action.

So couple A loads up what they can and gets it out before the river gets out of its banks.

Couple B does nothing. Left their dog in the house--drowns. Left their new camper in the driveway--flooded. House and stuff in it flooded.