As many of you who watch the news know, Nevada, California, Arizona and Southern Utah have been deluged with many days of hard, steady rain. Several homes in Arizona (just north of Las Vegas) were washed in the Virgin River. The same storms hit us and Darrell and I thought we would be just fine...they installed (several years ago) a 6 foot tall berm around all the surrounding properties...boy, were we wrong!
Everything was fine until Wednesday night. The rain had been steady all day again and the word came that our local reservoir had reached capacity and was overflowing, and overflow would be coming our way. We still weren't worried, as everyone assured us that the berm would channel any water into the big hay fields down the road.
At 11:45 pm I walked to the back of our property and checked the berm, doing great, no water flowing past at all. I went into the house and fired up my laptop to goof off for awhile (I was too nervous to sleep).
At 12:15 I looked out a window to see that we had gone from dry ground to several feet of water completely surrounding our home....the berm had broken 1/4 mile away. Darrell and I fought off the water seeping though tiny, tiny hairline cracks in the basement until daylight with several wet dry vacs, but more water was starting to seep in and we were slowly losing the battle . I went outside to dump another bucket of water to see 2 pickups parking on the road and men donning mud knee boots and heading through the water towards me.
These wonderful gentlemen quickly ased the situation and without any fan fare, started making calls. Within 1/2 and hour at least 25 people from the local church and other neighbors showed up with mud pumps, pump trucks, sandbags, big athletic sons (even several members of the high school wrestling team showed up), wet dry vacs, bags of towels... you name it - it was here!
If you've never witnessed a Christmas Miracle, here it is!!

The water had receded alittle, but the front of the house at daybreak..

Side of the house looking West

Sandbagging the rear of the house and running the mud pump. What a great neighbor!!

Then the local utility company showed up with a "Ditch Witch". It pumped 800 gallons per minute. Took only a few minutes to pump out the entire sandbagged area. I want one of these now!

A local gal that was home from college. Wasn't that nice of her to help us? And no, we had never met her before.
R

Rain drops fell for a few minutes, but Darrell had a heartfelt talk with "the big guy" and the rain suddenly stopped....

Finally, some sunshine in the afternoon. The mud pump got over 8 ft of water out of our well and surprisingly, it works just fine.

All in all, thanks to people we did not even know, our home was saved and we received the best Christmas gift of all time. It really was a Christmas miracle!!!

Happy holidays to you and yours!

Tammy & Darrell Lynch
at "Lake Lynch", Utah