A flooding update…
….as we reported earlier, a large Devon herd was threatened by flooding associated with all the storms in the Midwest. Most of the cattle of the Fourche River farm were isolated when the stream went over it’s banks.
A sheriff who went on a rescue mission drowned in the flood and a wildlife officer and the two women they were trying to help are all missing and feared dead. The Devon breeder, Greg Hickl, president of the North American Devon Association, wrote the following for members of his American Herbataurus Association. It’s quite an adventure:
“When we went to bed on Thursday night, we were forecasted to get about 1.3 inches out of the weather system moving thru. We had received about .25” before going to bed at about 11pm, and when I checked our Devon cattle shortly before dark, they were all on higher ground (except for one cow that had just calved while I was checking them.) We had our commercial cattle (about 150 head) in the bottoms across the river, but they also had access to higher ground. Our cows have always moved to higher ground if the rain starts to accumulate, but this time was different.
Apparently, the weather system intensified at around midnight, and dumped 8-9” of rain (within about 2.5-3 hours) west of us about 20 miles at the headwaters of the Fourche. We had an estimated 7-8” within about 3 hours, but it didn’t wake me until 1:40am and I noticed that the river was already out into our lower fields. At that point, I was lamenting the possible loss of the nice cow/calf (it was a heifer) pair that I had left down there, with no idea that most of our other Devon cows (total of about 140 cows) had sought shelter from the lightening along a treeline by Kelly Creek, close to the river.
Apparently, the water accumulated so quickly that they were quickly trapped, and we had no knowledge of the disaster until daylight came around and we realized that there were only about 4 cows left in our pasture. To give you an idea of the amount of water running thru the valley yesterday morning…our river basin is normally about 150’ wide and about 15’ deep…yesterday the river basin itself was probably around 35’ deep with the river expanding to about ¾ mile wide.
The excruciating part of our dilemma is that we could hear many of the cows bawling a far distance off, but couldn’t get anywhere near them due to the depth and swiftness of the swollen river. We attempted walking in from the sides in three different places, and then borrowed a motorboat with a 30hp engine and ended up cancelling our search after realizing that we couldn’t control the boat due to the strength of the rapids even 1/4mile away from the river. In fact, when we baled out of our boat trip and headed back, the 30hp engine was barely strong enough to move us upstream. We then waited as the river crested around 11:30am and started to recede.
At about 12:30pm, we gathered six capable folks together and waded thru the woods to the cattle, which was a distance of about .6 mile. While the water was receding rapidly, it was still waist to chest-deep even 1/2mile from the river basin. When we arrived at the location of the cows, we found them about 1/8 mile west of our east fence-line, in a high spot in a thicket. There appeared to be about 30 cows and a few calves. We realized at that time that it was still far too deep to move them upstream to safety, so I set a mark on a tree and decided to wait until the water receded another 2’. After the water receded about 1.25’, the cows started moving back on their own, so I got ahead of them and called while the others pushed them in back. We made it about 2/3 of the way back and hit a 30’ slough that I had to swim, and the cows refused to follow, balled up and turned and got in a bad current headed back in the direction we came from. We drifted with the herd back to the original location, freeing cows and calves from brush as they were getting caught up. We ended up back in the same location, and waited until 7:30pm to try again, as they were forecasting another 3-4 inches of rain last night and they were already worn out…we felt that we had to get them out at that point.
On our second attempt, they balked a couple of times at the deep spots, but our capable help was able to force them forward until we finally cut a neighbors fence and moved them onto higher ground a little over .5 mile from where we started. Along the way, we collected several more groups that had found refuge in high spots. We herded them back to our place and penned them as night fell, having collected about 90-100 of the estimated 140.
At this point, there is no way to get across the river to the other side, but it appears that about half of our cows are gone there. We’ve heard that some of them may have ended up on a farm about 1 mile downstream, but probably won’t be able to get across until tomorrow. After today’s storm passes, we intend to scrub this side of the river for any remaining survivors. We are hopeful that we are as blessed with the end result across the river as we were on this side.
For those that haven’t heard, a good friend of ours that is a Wildlife Officer (Joel Campora) was called out to a swift-water rescue at 1:30 am early yesterday morning with our county Sheriff (Cody Carpenter). They were attempting to rescue 2 women whose house was flooding, and when they arrived (on a boat) and entered the home to evacuate them, the house collapsed. They found Cody’s body about 1 mile downstream yesterday afternoon, and have yet to find Joel or the other two women. PLEASE PRAY FERVENTLY FOR A MIRACLE for Joel and these 2 women.”