When I was here by myself, going to flood recovery meetings kept me busy. There were a lot of them, but now they have tapered down to a few. Once a month the same group has two meetings in one day with slightly different attendees. These are the steering committees of the coalition that is supposedly steering the recovery of the river. I pushed my way in there because I like to know what is going on.

Mr. Troutbend is staying home to keep working on his projects. Last night I thanked him for all the hard work he has been doing around here. He is constantly on the go, and yesterday he set up a small pump to water the back lawn because we haven't had rain in a long time. Getting the irrigation system working with the new larger pump is going to require a lot of work because many of our sprinkler pipes were broken or carried away in the flood.

We have found several places around our bridge where the river bank looks okay, but underneath the top surface it's all hollowed out leaving the tree roots as the only support for about 4 inches of dirt. When you walk on it, your foot sinks in. Someone from the county indicated to me that they might come put riprap around the bridge ends, but I don't know how far along the bank this would extend, and if would solve our problem. Or when they would do it. Or if they will do it. It's hard to make plans and figure out if we should go ahead and hire someone to try to address it. Not that it is an emergency, but it's not good.



You can see some of the sprinkler pipe coming out of that culvert.