Swimming...in the street.

The water went all the way up to the hotel. 

The truck making waves. 

A truck coming through to help. 

On the other side overflowing onto the sidewalk. 

Looking across the street. 

The pond closest to my house overflowing. 

My dog and all the water. 

A car stalled trying to get out. 

The water started going onto the sidewalk. 

That water was still there Sunday night. 

The current was pretty intense. 

A car trying to make its way through. 

Finally the police tried to block off the watery area. 

Some people tried to drive across the water, and their cars stalled from the water. 

The water at it's deepest was about knee-level. 

Looking across at the house we were sandbagging. 

Across the street, the "river" as we called it actually had a current. 

The pond closest to my house overflowing. 

So, as I was racking my brain to try to come up with a topic to write about, my mom yelled up the stairs for me to come downstairs. As you may know, we had a pretty big storm come through as a result of the hurricanes down south. My neighbor had called my mom and told her that at 8 am, the water was 12 feet from her back door, and at about 10 am, it had gotten to a little over a foot away. We went over to pick up her daughter, Chloe, and tried to drive there, but could only get to about 150 feet from the house before the water would have ruined the engine. I'm going to try to explain this the best I can, so to do that I took 5 minutes and put together a crude map of what's around my house with paint. 

The purple star is my house, and the orange star is the people who we were trying to help. The two blue ovals are the two ponds, which were what was filling up and overflowing towards the houses and streets. Our house is on a hill, and not near a lake, so it was safe. 

We had to call every hardware store we could think of, then finally we found a Home Depot about 10 minutes away that had bags of sand. To prevent the water from entering the house, we had to put sand into plastic garbage bags and line the outside of the house so it would create a barrier from the water. We drove all the way there, to find that the only bags they had were 50 pound bags. My mom and I had to take 15 of these, put them on a cart, push the cart out to the car, and load them into the car. 

After that, we drive back towards my house, to find that the main road (down the middle of the picture) has almost completely flooded, and even though we have a four wheel drive, we didn't want to chance it with the back of the car weighed down with the sand. We drove all the way around and got in, and we set up shop in my garage. Thus, craziness ensued. It started out as my mom, Chloe, and I making these bags, putting them in garbage cans, and dragging them through almost knee-deep water (that was freezing cold, might I add) to the house. As we were doing this, some neighbors took notice, and decided to help. Finally, we got into a groove of making these bags and hauling them across the street. Meanwhile, I was absolutely soaked. Finally, we got all of the sandbags made and the house safe. I went home and took a HOT shower, and we finally got back to our original plan for the day, sitting around doing absolutely nothing. 

That was an interesting Saturday....