The event that changed our normal life.

Lately our family has been turned on it's head from an event that has crippled our city. On Tuesday, May 31st, 2011, as I was beginning another what seemed to be normal day the news came that a big rainfall had happened north of our city and that the levels of the water were expected to crest over the current level of the levees.

We were given 36 hours to get everything out of house that we could. We were beyond blessed when friends from everywhere started pouring into our small home grabbing things and loading them into a moving van as quickly as possible. There was no time to grab boxes nor could you find them within two hours after hearing the warning. So earthly things that we held dear to us were thrown into anything that would hold. Many of them ended up in garbage bags to be stored in families garages.

We worked late into the night and managed to pull most of our possessions out. The next thing we went after were the extras that we had poured into our house two years before when we gutted it after purchasing it and redid it all. The water was only suppose to get as high as the counters. Luckily officials raised the dikes in time and we did not get flooded.

We moved out on Tuesday and Wednesday and my parents moved into a new home they had purchased a couple months earlier on Thursday and Friday that week. Saturday morning I left with the baby to Florida for an already scheduled vacation with the sister. I am so glad I was able to enjoy that time down there especially knowing now everything that was still to come.

I was gone for 10 days in Florida and returned Monday evening. The next week we spent at my parent's house debating if we should slowly start returning home. Luckily we never moved pass talking. We enjoyed a great Father's Day on Sunday, June 19th and on Monday, June 20th we got word that once again we were at risk of Flooding and this time it didn't look like anything could be done to stop it.

An enormous amount of rain and melt off in Canada had left the 3 dams in Canada at full capacity and they were forced to send down record amount of water otherwise the dams would overflow and they wouldn't be able to control the amount of water that came. Throughout the days every press conference got worse and worse with the amount of water that was being released from the Canadian Dams. With the Corp of Engineers here to help it finally became resigned that our town was going to flood and flood some 10 feet over what it did in 1969. After the 1969 they rerouted the river and it was guaranteed that we would never flood again. Everyone's was under that assumption as there was 1 in 10 houses that had Flood insurance. Us not being one of them.

On Wednesday, June 22 at 12:57 pm the sirens sounded in Minot signifying that our greatest fears were becoming a reality. We were flooding. Thursday, June 23rd early in the morning we received pictures from friends in our neighborhood that our house was already flooded even though the crest was still 3 days away. For the next several days we were literally GLUED to the TV with constant flood coverage watching neighborhoods, parks, pools, school and many homes loose the fight against the river. Hoping that the flyovers would show us some picture of our house, we were lucky to see our house twice. Once on June 23rd in a Denver Post picture and then again on Monday when all we could see was the roof.

Now we wait as the river returns to normal levels and water is pumped out of our streets in order to go back and assess the damage to our home.