Waterworld

As everyone knows, a lot of water has fallen in New England over the past 72 hours. We went for a ride this morning, to take a look around at the results. Our house is only about 100 yards from the Merrimack River, which is high and flooding everywhere. Fortunately for us, we're about 3/4 of a mile upstream from a very wide dam, and we haven't had any problems. But there's a lot of water nearby...

Here are some pictures of Lawrence. (Here is the same set, slightly smaller for those with dial-up, or small monitors.)

First, we rode up to the boat house, which is only about a block and a half away. The parking lot is, obviously underwater. This is also the case at the boat ramp at the public park, 1/2 mile in the other direction.

Then down to Broadway, route 28, which is a fairly major road. The bridge is just below the dam that I spoke of, and it's closed today. According to the police officer who was preventing traffic, the Army Corps of Engineers is worried about the pilings being undermined, and they didn't want anyone on it. When you see the dam, you need to keep in mind that that gently sloping 5 foot drop is normally 25-30 feet. The river is very high.

Down on the Riverwalk (well, it would be a Riverswim today), you can again see how high the Merrimack is running. If it were as high over flood stage above the dam as below it, we wouldn't be dry. That mill building on the right in this picture has most of its first floor underwater.



We've got a couple of pictures at the intersection of route 28 and route 133 in Andover, Shawsheen village. You can see the top of a car, and the tops of a couple of soccer nets. Finally, another major road, route 114 in Lawrence, is closed at 495 because of the flooding of the Spicket River. You can see that the Friendly's is half submerged.


We are fine, our house is fine, our neighborhood is fine. But there are a lot of people who've had some real significant problems as a result of this storm...