American Buddhist Perspectives
Thursday night, as area rivers were expected to reach their crests, my brother and I made our way out to the local gun club. The club had become an impromptu sandbag filling site after the nearby fire station was surrounded by water. We joined the crowd at one of the three piles of sand and began filling bag after bag. We didn’t have a specific plan – just to help – and we gave our first load of bags to the first person to pull up with a truck.
Then we loaded his truck with a load and headed to the heart of the flooding.
We found a road (below) where residents were attempting to line the entire ditch. The water was flooding over it and into the street; from there it was a downhill shot right into their houses. Soon there were about a dozen trucks, about half filled with volunteers, the other half residents I would guess, taking load after load out to battle the rising water.
The water was leaking through in places, but for the most part we kept it under control.
Police were allegedly giving tickets to people for driving too fast along flooded roads, causing wakes that damaged or just flowed over people’s sandbags.
Meanwhile, back at the trap club, a ditch was dug to channel waters into a large pit. By evening the pit had become a lake.
Overlooking the trap club as rain begins to fall to the southeast.
And this morning, on a trip out to monitor the new lake (if it goes up about 5 or 6 more feet, it will spill over into a neighboring grade school). Rain starts to fall in the south hills. It has been light and the forecast is for continued light rain, but still not a welcome sight.
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