Tag Archives: flood

Kemptville Flooding Panorama

I put together a panoramic picture of the flooding of Curry Park on the Kemptville Creek. I used an application called Hugin.

Panoramic view of the flooding of Kemptville Creek near Curry Park in 2008

There is an add-on application for Hugin called autopano which made short work of calculating all of the stitch points for the panorama. The only problem with autopano is there isn’t a pre-compiled OS X version so I started putting together the panorama on my Windows XP box. That was fine until it came time to produce the final panorama file as for some reason, the enblend application kept crashing on my Windows XP box.

To get around that I took the autopano generated project file and moved over to the iBook to produce the final result. Not too bad for the first time using the Hugin application and the first time I’ve made a panoramic photo. Next I’ll have to figure out how to re-balance the colours so that it’s not obvious it’s stitched together. ;)

Kemptville Creek Flooding Update

By Jeff Ivany

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The Kemptville Creek is still at the highest level I have seen in the few years we’ve been here in North Grenville. Today we had some rain which isn’t great but it doesn’t seem to have caused any major change to the water level around Curry Park. Yes, there was an increase but not on a massive scale.

I’ve seen some interesting things over the past 36 hours though. Yesterday some idiot decided that it would be a good idea to drive his truck down the flooded lane way to the Curry park boat launch. He backed down until his floorboards were in the water, sat there for a good 5 minutes and then stomped on the gas to come flying out of the water. I’m not entirely sure what the point of that was. I’m sure they thought it was fun to some extent but I don’t think I’d be going into that water in anything right now. It’s very fast moving and there is a lot of junk floating down the creek.

As for stuff floating down the creek, this evening I caught a glimpse of someone in a kayak coming down the creek towards the Bridge St bridge. Again, not entirely sure what this rocket scientist was thinking as I don’t think there is more than about 2 feet of clearance under the bridge right now. I didn’t get to see what happen to this person although I did see the abandoned kayak pulled up on the grass on the downstream side of the bridge. I’m guessing that the owner got under/around the bridge some how and then decided that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea anymore.

Now, tonight is getting more interesting. I noticed a number of North Grenville trucks coming and going out of the pumping station that is beside the creek. There’s a lot of activity and a couple honey wagons working to pump out, uh, honey. ;) I’m guessing that the pump has developed some issue and is getting fixed. I’m just hoping that I don’t get anything backing up through the drain in my basement. That would really suck.

I’ll keep adding pictures to the Kemptville Creek Flooding gallery as I have the time. I’m personally interested in having a record of the water levels for my future reference. Now when someone tells me the predicted water levels will be greater than 2008, I’ll know it’s time to consider building that ark.

Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink

By Jeff Ivany

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As of today, Kemptville, Ontario can probably be described by a quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink

We just got notice this evening of two water related issues that are (or may be) affecting our little town:

The first is a boil water advisory (PDF link) for the town of Kemptville. I guess they had a test come back with an E. Coli count higher than the provincial limit on one of the wells that feeds the town. Therefore, we get to boil our water for the weekend and until further notice. Fantastic.

The second is for a high water warning (PDF link) for Kemptville Creek in the town of Kemptville. Wonderful. All of this warm weather they are predicting for us now is going to melt the huge amounts of snow we have and that means one thing – potential flooding.

Living in a small town has some great advantages when stuff like this happens. We’ve had three people come by to check and see if we heard about the boil advisory. That’s in addition to the person who had to drop off the official notice at our house (hand delivered and taped to the door for anyone who isn’t home at the time).

Of course, now is when we wonder about our house which is a stone’s throw away from the Kemptville Creek. We’re not actually water front but there’s not much between us and the water and we are supposedly above the 100 year flood plain level. Here’s hoping that this is still the case! We’ve been told lots of stories by our neighbours about previous years and how high the water has been. From what we’ve been told, we should be “safe”. I guess it helps that we are downstream of one of the bridges in town so if it jams, the water should stay upstream of us. That’s all fine and dandy until the water gets high enough to come over the road.

I wonder if the house has a wedge shaped bottom… maybe we’ll just float away with all the animals like Noah did…

Updated: Well, the good news is the boil water advisory has now been lifted. Now we just get to see how much water we’re going to get in the Kemptville Creek with the big thaw that is happening.

Ruptured Resin Tank on Kemore Water Softener

By Jeff Ivany

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The Boss came home yesterday to discover that there was a lot of water coming out of our Kenmore water softener onto the basement floor. Luckily, the majority of the water had made it into the sump hole and was being contained but it was past the point of overflowing. Water was starting to creep across the basement floor. The Boss quickly shut the bypass valve and the water stopped flowing out of the water softener.

It turns out that the resin tank (can alternatively be called a mineral tank on some models) has ruptured. The Kenmore water softener is a “tank in tank” design. Basically, the resin tank is inside the brine tank. The brine tank is where you add salt. The problem with a cracked resin tank is that all of the water for the house typically goes through the resin tank to get softened before going to any of the faucets. With a cracked resin tank, the water isn’t contained and is freely flowing out into the brine tank and onto the floor (in my case).

To top it all off, the silly little plastic bypass valve is leaking both internally and externally. I’ve got a constant fast drip coming from the valve outside of the tank. Internally the valve is not completely closed as there is still water flowing into the resin tank. This is causing major problems as I can’t leave my household water turned on. Right now I’ve got the whole house water turned off at the water meter until I can get at least the bypass valve replace.

This morning I called Sears Home Central and got pricing on the parts required to fix/replace the resin tank and associated parts. The grand total? Over $700 before tax and that’s just for the parts – installation would be extra and who knows what else might be broken now due to the high pressure water that was spraying the electrical control unit, etc.

Needless to say, I think I’m going to be buying a new water softener by the weekend. I quickly looked online at both sears.ca and sears.com to get an idea of what an equivalent softener would cost. I can definitely buy a new one for not much more than $700 + labour + tax. Thanks to the strong Canadian dollar I may be better of buying one from the US though. As with many products right now, the Canadian versions all appear to be much higher cost that their equivalent US version.

There are two other things I’m installing this weekend because of this. The first is a true copper bypass system. I’m going to put in a couple valves so that I can bypass the water softener completely without having to rely on a flimsy plastic valve. The second is a sump pump. I’ve never had a water problem before that required me having a sump pump but I don’t want to have to deal with another flood caused by a ruptured resin tank. I can only imagine how much water could have accumulated in the basement if we had been away for a couple days. *shudder*