Flood
"I'm going to swim before it starts raining," I said yesterday about 10:30 a.m."TURN AROUND. DON'T DROWN," Eli 13.9 said. We've been hearing quite a lot about safety at low water crossings lately.
I've written about the drought for years, because we've been in it for years (almost a decade).
Not anymore, apparently.
It's rained twenty days in a row. We had years during the drought when it didn't rain twenty days in a year, and now we're getting it consecutively.
Yesterday, I swam my sad little half mile (stupid infraspinatus muscle) and was back home about an hour before it started raining.
Then it rained. And rained. And rained. About five inches worth.
This was our yard yesterday, and it wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot:
If you look closely, that's a mini-river flowing from our backyard down to the street. The rain had actually slowed down at this point (although if you click on the image, you'll see that it was still raining very hard, and continued to for hours).
We live up on a "ridge", so everything flows down from our house, essentially. The rest of the city? Not always so fortunate. Here's what it looked like downtown:
See that water next to his right hand? That's a football stadium under eight feet of water. See the water outside the stadium? That's from a creek (Shoal Creek) that massively overflowed its banks yesterday. Oh, and that water outside the stadium? That's covering a road. The normal path of the creek is well away from that point
We've had 17 inches of rain this month, which obliterates all the monthly records previous. That's more than half the rainfall of an average year in 26 days.
Incredibly, we didn't even have it as bad as Houston. I woke up this morning and saw that certain areas in Houston had 10 inches of rain overnight. Houston is a big lake right now.
Here's a google image search on "photos of flooding in Texas 2015". It's stunning.
Flood Photos.
It's hard to understand (especially for me, because this is incredibly rare down here) but rivers can rise at incredible rates. The Blanco river (southwest of Austin) rose seventeen feet in thirty minutes Saturday night. When the flood stage is thirteen feet, that's a disaster (it crested at over 41 feet). So even if you think you're taking the proper precautions, when you're near a river, events can quickly become overwhelming.
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