A little flood news:

Actually, just a personal report. Last night, the Baraboo area was very nearly completely cut off from the rest of the state due to flooded roads and highways, and a mudslide on Highway 12 where it goes through the bluffs.

Parts of I-90/94 and I-39 were closed down. State roads south of town had been closed for a while already - those are below the river bed, so no big surprise there. State 33 was pretty chancy even when I drove home around 4 in the afternoon - big pools of standing water in a few places narrowed the road to a single lane.

Funny little bit of irony: one of the newscasts last night told us that the only way in or out of Baraboo by car was via the Merrimac Ferry.


View Larger Map

That's right. The only way to drive in or out, at the height of a Hundred Year Flood, was to take a boat across a lake.

Anyway, my wife and kids had gone to Milwaukee/Racine/Kenosha Thursday to visit various people, and by the time I'd been home for an hour it came pretty clear that driving back Thursday night in the dark and the rain in a probably-vain hope of finding an open and relatively safe road was a really bad idea. So they stayed at Grandma's house and got to driving back this morning.

Now it's quarter past three, and they're still not home. They got detoured off I-94 by Johnson Creek, then got back on until Madison, then went over to Hwy 12 (which is open again now) because I-90/94 is still closed.

And, because I-90/94 is still closed, as you can imagine, traffic on Hwy 12 is slow and tight.

Could be worse, though. It could still be a 2-lane the whole way up.

And it could be worse: our house could be down where the flooding is. It's not.

I'm going to go out and get some pictures tomorrow.