Thank You

I wish to thank all of you who have been praying for my family. Prepping is key in life because we never know what will happen today. Prepping has made all the difference in my life and the aftermath and cleanup of the flash flooding that hit my farm.

The good thing for us is that we have built up prep supplies to take care of farm issues too, and have assembled quick fences where we lost them. The animals are doing well and the garden is popping!

For all that live in the southwest we must never minimize the very real risk of flash flooding. I will take a moment and express to everyone that if you travel through the southwest you must NEVER go into arroyo's(ditches or canals). It may be as sunny and dry outside and the mountains may be having rain- the arroyo's are lethal. Seems like every year I read about a kid from a NM city that either ignored this warning or did not know this, and drowns.

Something else to mention...when we were assessing the livestock my husband and I had a stop action plan regardless of loss of animals. We planned ahead of this so we would not place any person at risk of harm or death. Sounds simple when one is rational, but in heightened emotional or physical duress reasoning is tossed out the window. This is one reason I believe that many would be civilian rescuers die in the act of rescuing another. It is important to act quickly, but planning is critical. For example, if someone is drowning, your first thought is to jump in- but the reality is that a drowning victim will use anything to get air...even standing on you. So a moment of searching for another method seems time delaying but in the end may allow everyone to go home at night.

Oh and back to the stop action plan, in case you are wondering. We had planned to save to lambs and kids as they are our breeding stock. All else we would have let fend for themselves if things were worse. Fortunately we did not have to do this!

Now to why my property became a flash flood site- north east of us, the county approved a mini rural development that is diverting an arroyo. With so many voicing concern the county still approved this and as a result the flooding just goes everywhere. Money instead of common sense has fueled this and will be a problem to us perhaps from now on. So prep work to raise barns is our new project as we can complain and go to repeat county meetings and wait for the government to resolve this(I am pausing for all of you to stop laughing) and resolve the problem ourselves. And for the record we only have an average of 7-9" of rain a year that comes during the monsoon season June 20- July 20(approximately) so this is not an ongoing problem and we have much time to mend fences!