MossRoad
Super Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2001
- Messages
- 59,956
- Location
- South Bend, Indiana (near)
- Tractor
- Power Trac PT425 2001 Model Year
Has it ever happened before?
Kind of. I once debeaded a tire, but the tire stayed on the rim as I was doing a low speed turn on a slope, with 800lbs or so out front. I hadn't checked the tire pressures in ages, and they had dropped to 7-10psi, which is just too low for my slopes. As soon as I put air in the valve stem, the tire reseated itself. Easy peazey.Has it ever happened before?
Sounds like your dad thought ahead.Sounds like a day where you accomplished something at least. I've been in the Smokey's during floods. Amazing amounts of water.
Here, there is rarely a flood. The river through town comes up once in a while, but we are a couple miles from it. Pretty darn flat around here. The most rain I've ever seen at once is 5" in a day, and it caused very minor erosion in the dirt shoulder in front of our house, but that's about it.
My father had dug swales in his yard to protect the house from 100 year floods. I only saw them work once, but work they did.
Our yard is slightly sloped in places for the same reason. The only time I've seen the swales with water in them was when the mole popped our swimming pool liner.
At my last job, I kept pressing for a backup generator. They kept installing multiple small UPS boxes. At best, we could keep all the servers running long enough for someone to come in and shut them down nicely. I asked my mentor, the publisher, why and he said you can redundancy yourself into the poorhouse. They found a total loss of 24 hours of data input was tolerable. They backed up every 24 hours. So that was good enough. Server damage was minimal, although there were several times when we'd lose multiple drives in one instance. Again, they thought the risk was tolerable.Sounds like your dad thought ahead.
5" is a third of our "normal" rainfall, half of what we have been getting in each of the last four years. Our insurer said that they would happily insure against rising water, but not water flowing down hill. Go figure.
We are at the top of a big hill (1200' down in mile one way, and 2000' down in a couple of miles the other), and I worry about drainage a lot because with the slopes, the speed of moving water is so erosive. I have worked on lots of projects here, and I find myself constantly going "how far should I mitigate this risk?" "How much will it cost?" "How much will it cost if I underbuild, and it fails?" Fire, earthquake, flood... "Do I really believe that a 100 year flood is once in a hundred years these days?" (Me, no, based on the last few decades...) I guess generally I try for solutions that I think will be good twenty-five to a hundred years, I.e. fix it once and done for me, and perhaps the next owner as well. With a changing climate, I find it hard to have confidence in my predictions.
The joys of small property ownership, and I do enjoy the constantly changing nature of the problems.
Now on to designing a loading dock for the barn, so the Power-Trac bucket and forks don't chew up the side of the barn. (Actually they don't when I am driving, but we recently had a load of hay in and the loading team were monkeying around at the end and managed muck up the doorsill somehow. Their squeeze weighs something like 50,000lbs, so when it hits/presses against a wood structure directly, the barn gives. Our barn door gave. It is three feet above grade, so I am going to try to put in a semi style loading dock. I just need to figure out how to beef up the barn to take the hit...
I see where your publisher was coming from. Makes sense to me.At my last job, I kept pressing for a backup generator. They kept installing multiple small UPS boxes. At best, we could keep all the servers running long enough for someone to come in and shut them down nicely. I asked my mentor, the publisher, why and he said you can redundancy yourself into the poorhouse. They found a total loss of 24 hours of data input was tolerable. They backed up every 24 hours. So that was good enough. Server damage was minimal, although there were several times when we'd lose multiple drives in one instance. Again, they thought the risk was tolerable.
So, I keep that in mind. How badly do I want to protect my property, without spending more than just replacing everything is worth? How much damage am I willing to tolerate?