12/11/14 - Major Storm, Creek Flooding

Twitter- More continuous updates, a few more pictures.
Flickr - More vibrant pictures of trash as well as some highlights of wildlife in the neighborhood and Bay.

So I thought I would be able to get to at least some of that stuff (shopping carts, strollers, etc.) at some point in the near future, but I was gravely wrong, not mistaken, but wrong. As far as I am aware, all that stuff from three days ago is currently making it's way into Nature's Landfill, otherwise known as large bodies of water like the SF Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

A very big rainstorm made it to Silicon Valley (Yay! Some rain!) and promptly flooded all the creeks and waterways. It was raining heavily, and I happened to have a car today, so  thought I'd check out a few other parts of the creek.

 Here is the view from Monroe, facing south, toward the train tracks. Lots of water; sadly, all of this is just dumping to the bay instead of filling up reservoirs or wells.

 Here is El Camino Real facing north.

And El Camino Real Facing south.

 Lastly, I headed down to Pruneridge at Maywood Park, where I found a nice big pile of trash including a Little-Tykes style tricycle, not too unlike the tractor I pulled out. You may not be able to see it with the resolution of the photo posted, but that middle bucket has a high heel shoe and two spray cans plainly visible, and who knows what lies beneath.

On second thought, why don't I just crop it and give you the closeup. Hollow plastic tricycle and cans of spray paint. Are dumpings like these the source of all that miserable trash and hazardous waste that I came across one of my first few weeks of this blog?

Or

Did some very nice person or group of people trudge through this creek one day and bag all of this stuff up? Maybe a lot of this showed up from the flood just a few days ago like all the trash did in my neighborhood. Only, perhaps these people were much wiser, watched the weather report, and saw an even bigger storm was coming which would surely carry all of this to the bay.

If this latter possibility is indeed the case, I wish I could contact these people and thank them.

Here's the water coming from the south.

Here it's rushing under a bridge on Pruneridge.

And here it's heading toward the bay. Thankfully that trash is on the side and not in the creek.

And here's Maywood Park. I've never been here before, but it's quite pretty.

So there you have it, a heavy day of rain (still raining hard during picture taking) has finally come to drought-stricken California. However, it creates the ever-powerful litter freight-train constantly moving anything and everything in the waterways downstream to the bay. Unfortunately, I missed my chance to help and pull the carts and strollers out. Fortunately, it looks like someone else took the time and created a big heap of trash that is not going to the bay.