Cool and wet. We got hammered in my part of town yesterday. I had 4 inches of rain in a few hours at my house by the time I got to bed, and the surrounding area had the same or more. My local drainage ditch/creek was over the banks at the sensor location, not all that far from my house. ~4 inches in 2 hours will do that. I’ll look at the totals later today.
Did most of my errands yesterday before the rain hit. Got my local auctioneer to agree to take my first load of stuff Tuesday morning. Went by my secondary and dropped a couple of items there. Missed the school open house. Ate donuts instead of lunch. And smaller child lost at basketball (and lost a tooth, the third in a month.)
The rain started in the afternoon. We got hammered with some really hard downpour during the b-ball game, but gauges said only 0.33 inches. Then it cleared up for a while, but started hammering down again around 11pm. At 1am, several gauges in my area had over 5 inches in 12 hours and ~4.5 in the previous three. That’s a lot of rain, even by Houston standards. And it was VERY localized. Having access to almost real time data for the whole county, both channel levels and rainfall is a miracle of the modern age. I looked at the weather radar, looked at the rainfall gauges, looked at the channel levels (water level in creeks and bayous) and was able to make some very well informed decisions. One was to move my truck from the street to the driveway (up hill 18″.) I should have done it earlier as the street was flooded to the running boards. At least it didn’t flood to the floorboards. Still, I’ll have to look at the lube in the differential. If my diff has a breather valve and it goes underwater, water can get in, or so I’ve been told. Further down the street if there were cars on the street they got flooded.
Just a VERY local disaster for a few people, unless there will be more flooding downstream as all that water leaves the system… and no one cares about the tiny disasters except the people in them.
Watching the storm effects kept me up later than I wanted to be. So I’m sleeping in later too. Then smaller child and I better get some stuff picked up around the house. I’d like to get some more stuff put away, a couple of things tested and listed for ebay, and put some more things in the pile for Tuesday morning. And it’s always nicer if my wife comes home to a clean house…
I’m pretty sure at least a few of my neighbors went to bed without a care, and woke up to flooded cars or even homes downstream from me. Very personal and local disasters. Stacks of Mountain House won’t be much use, but stacks of $100 bills, paid up insurance, cleanup supplies, and other preps will. It’s not always TEOTWAWKI. Sometimes it’s just the end of this thing, right here and right now, and only for us that is the disaster we’re prepping for.
Stack something today.
nick