Clearing Up a Misconception

Dear readers,

A couple weeks ago we got a lot of rain and had a pretty significant amount of water land in the park. To be exact, we went from having a few puddles at 7 AM on Thursday, May 13 to having 4 feet of rushing water on the ground by 7:30 AM. At the time we believed the deluge to be the result of Shabbona Lake State Park opening their floodgates. Shabbona is upstream from us and their lake feeds into the Big Indian Creek. The Big Indian meanders down from the lake, widening gradually as it goes, and runs through our property before heading further south where it eventually feeds into the Fox River in Ottawa, Illinois.

We were concerned that Shabbona seemed to have the ability to flood us at a moment's notice. We worried about the fate of any Stonehouse campers who happened to be in the way when the gates were opened so we spoke with the Shabbona park ranger. He very nicely assured us that while they do have a spillway, they don't use it to create floods. In fact, Shabbona Lake State Park helps control flooding by taking in and storing large amounts of rainwater and run-off. The mechanism for their spillway is 40 feet underwater and while divers could go down and open it under dire circumstances, they certainly don't do so as a general practice.

The ranger we spoke with believes that the flooding we get almost every spring is a result of our being in a very low lying area which happens to be at the locus of several tributaries, ditches and creeks. Unfortunately there isn't anything at all we can do about that and he suggested that we should be prepared for flooding anytime we get very large quanties of rain like we did two weeks ago. So, the good news is that Shabbona Lake State Park isn't negligently dumping their overflow on us, but the bad news is that avoiding flooding (or even being aware that floods are coming) isn't as simple as flipping a switch.

That being said, we will make sure that anyone who is camping here early next May is camping on high ground, and that anything and everything that could float away is tied down. :)

Sincerely,
Ellie