my world is a flood.

...was a flood.

Last week, I took some pictures of the incredible flooding around here, but I had trouble getting them off my camera. When it finally worked, only about half of my photos transferred. Of course, the half that didn't transfer was the better half - obliterated bridges, nonexistant roads, and boats floating in front yards.

Here's one of Rensselaer's main roads (of which there are only two - hah!). It was closed for almost a week due to spillage from the Iroquois River.


This yellow line is the road behind/beside my house, which leads onto the main road above. (The flooding from the above picture was on the other side of the circled house.) They closed this one down on a Tuesday night, also due to river spillage... I left town at 5:00, and when I came home at 11:30, both roads were blocked off, as well as several others I could have taken to get home. I had to pull over and think for a minute before I finally devised a way around all the closings.


This mess used to be my backyard.

Here's a little further east from my house. The yellow line waaay on the right is about where the river usually curves. The flood here stretched from the chiropractor's office next door (I was standing in his parking lot here, for anyone who's familiar with Rensselaer), through about ten yards and houses, across the main road, into three more low-ground houses on the other side of the road, and finally pooled in a nearby park.

These are the scary steps of my back "porch," which I never, ever use but braved for the sake of pictures. I really wanted to know how deep the water was, but I wasn't about to go wading through the river poo water. Luckily, one of my neighbors wasn't as concerned about E. coli nastiness as me - she let her kids splash around in it. They were playing in the circled area, and it was about waist high on the tallest kid, who looked to be about 10 or so.

While I was on the "porch," I looked around, never having seen where I live from this standpoint, and I noticed this on the roof of the bedroom in the first floor apartment:
It looks like poo, right? Is there really poo on my roof?



This is the other side of the river, while standing on the bridge. It banks where the lines are. The flood water to the left of the bank line is the same from the picture of my backyard above - further down the street.
Everything's pretty much back to normal around here - people are back in their houses and the waters have receeded for the most part. Up until a few days ago, all the low areas of town were still flooded, of course, but the subzero temperatures over the weekend fixed that. Now we have pools of ice where there used to be sidewalks and grass, and there were some kids actually ice skating in a front yard near my house. Where's the camera when you really need it!