Cole Footprints: Mother Nature

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Mother Nature

Mother Nature can sure create some chaos in the lives of farmers. It began raining here on Friday night, we were in a tornado warning, so as usual I was scared. Tornado's have definitely gotten my respect. They can totally devastate a whole community. Last year we had too many close calls with tornadoes, we narrowly escaped one that hit about a mile from us. It killed 1 person that lived about 3 1/2 miles away. We drove around and surveyed all the damage, it was totally unbelievable. The next tornado hit a couple of weeks later in a town about 18 miles from us, but was headed straight for us, then it turned and went east. This tornado was on the ground for about 140 miles. It killed 13 people in Arkansas. So you can now understand why I respect them. We went to my neighbor's house that has a basement in it (she calls it their "Fraidy Hole"), well thank the lord for her because she lets my whole family (including my 5 poodles) come there and hide out when we have these warnings. I feel so much safer knowing that I have a place to go.

Friday night it poured and poured, I think we received about 12 inches or more of rain. As usual, it tore down fences, destroyed culverts, eroded our creek beds, etc. I think we even had one cow that was trying to cross the creek and got washed down into another pasture. Her baby was on the other side waiting for her when we found her. This has created a ton of work for Wayne, not only for our place, but he will have to go help his dad fix all the damage on his place. Wayne was pretty mad Saturday as he surveyed all the damage. He had just finished fixing all the creek crossing from the last flood and now he has to start all over. We had a terrible flood here almost a year ago that did a lot of damage also. I think this flood did more than last years. We also had an ice storm this past winter that Wayne cleaned up broken tree limbs for weeks, actually I think we still run across limbs that still need cleaning up.