Wednesday, March 17, 2010

"A Flood of Waters Upon the Earth", Part 2

The Ipswich River is waay over its banks today. It's hard to get from here to anyplace along the river because of road closures from flooding. All along the walk from our house to the Choate Bridge in the center of Ipswich, where the video taken, there are houses being pumped out. The other pictures were taken along the way.

The parking lot behind the downtown stores is completely under water, as shown in the first photo.



And the footbridge over the river is closed because the path is completely flooded on the other side (second photo).
The tall grey house in the third picture picture dates to 1723 and its ground floor is completely flooded. It has been next to the river for a long time and I wonder if it has happened before. We've never seen it quite so bad before, even after the major floods of 2 years ago when all the bridges were damaged.
The video at the end shows how fast the river was moving today and how far over the banks it is - the trees are normally above the bank. This was taken just after it crested but at high tide (it's a tidal river) so the water was still high. By tomorrow it should have started to recede. I hope.

2 comments:

Vivi said...

Welcome to spring! Is the -oh cripes, I'm blanking on the name - the olde house that is related to us which we toured off-season with Mom -- is that in any flooding danger? I would think it would just be carried off.

I guess, thinking about it, it's not right on the river.

The Ward Howe House? No. The Goodhue House? The Bradstreet House? The Hume House? The Stone House? Dang, why can't I get the name? I'm tired.

peaceable_tate said...

Wow, that's a lot of flooding! I know a lot of properties in Ipswich are quite close to the river, so what a mess for them.