Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Storm - Part III

PS We had to call in reinforcements to fix our road. Luckily, Nova Scotia is "improving" the highway to Peggy's Cove and were working just up the road from the camp. They came in and poured some sort of special gravel that packs down hard (not quite as hard as chip seal but same kind of idea), which will hopefully prevent future washouts of this nature.

Storm - Part II

The next morning Tim and I woke to the sound of our cell phone ringing, which can only be bad news that early in the day. Sure enough, it was the boys at the top of the hill calling to say that our road was washed out, and it was going to have to be fixed before the cooks could get in to prepare breakfast.

Tim, Matt, Griff, Ben, and Brad spent an hour fixing the road with a shovel and a broken wheelbarrow enough so that an emergency vehicle could get in if necessary, but despite their hard work, the road was still most definitely impassable for anything other than a 4 wheel drive.

This is what the road looked like after an hour of hard work. Before they began, Matt could lay down in one of the washouts in the fetal position and be completely hidden from view. While it's a little hard to tell, the hole that I'm standing in is almost halfway up my shin.

We received so much rain that night that it added about 3 inches of water to the pool in a period of 2 hours. To put that into perspective, it takes 4 hours for the pump to add the same amount of water to the pool each week.

As they day continued, we searched for evidence of lightening strikes around the camp. It split a tree behind cabins 4 and 5 and may have struck the ground in front of the lodge, but the earth shattering strike that woke us up the night before remained a mystery. Finally, as I was walking back to the cottage looking for evidence of the strike in nearby trees, I stumbled over a bit of ground that as far as I remembered had always been smooth before. I looked down at my feet and realize that I was standing in a perfectly charred out circle of mud - evidence of THE lightening strike.
A path of flattened grass led from the hole to the edge of the pool deck. Closer inspection of the pool area revealed not only melted and charred plastic along that section of the fence, but also a fresh crack running through the cement from one side of the pool deck to the other.

If you look closely, you can see a grayish coloured building with windows in the background. That's our cottage, which is about 50 feet from the pool. No wonder I thought the roof was going to fall in!