We've had almost 17 inches of rain in the last 2-3 days. We're very flat and coastal, so the good news is that the water rises slowly and can't carry anyone away, but the bad news is that it simply rises and stays there a long time, because there's not much of a gradient for it to drain off onto. Luckily we're not dealing with a storm surge.
There are a couple of acres of pond next to our house. The pond level seems to be just about topped off, as there's reasonable drainage across our road through a ditch that eventually empties into the nearest bay. The culvert at the road gets maxxed out if the rain comes down too intensely, as it has been doing--that incredible tropical downpour that seems like buckets emptying over your head--but the worst we've had to deal with is water deep enough to accommodate fish over our driveway. Our house is up on stilts; even the ground floor, which is a garage, appears to be in no danger of taking on water. I wish I could say the same for all of the homes in the county. We have homes set at elevations not more than a few feet above sea level. My foundation is at 17 feet, which is like a mountain around here, and then our living areas are on stilts a full floor above that.
There are fish and turtle and alligators and water birds all over the streets and ditches.
7 comments:
Y'know, it seems to me that alligators swimming along your local streets, just possibly, could be seen as related to the delays you've experienced with the FedEx trucks...
Good luck, in any case.
there's reasonable drainage across our road through a ditch that eventually empties into the nearest bay.
Reminds me of a tale I told MIL when my wife and I were stationed at Tyndall AFB, we were living in Panama City, and MIL and FIL were visiting. The four of us were driving along 98 with a good view of the Gulf, and MIL asked what those dark things were off in the distance in the Gulf. I told her it was an experimental system just installed that year: those were drain outlets at the end of pipes from the back bay, installed to control flooding. When the back bay water level got too high, the excess water would flow out the pipes and empty into the Gulf via those outlets. And it seemed to be working, as we hadn't had any flooding at all that spring, even though we'd had lots of rain.
MIL lapped it up, but wife couldn't keep a straight face, and finally explained that those dark things were channel markers.
I seem to recall, Tex, you and the council on which you sit had a discussion concerning the public pool. Seems to me Mother Nature has solved that problem for you, with a pool to serve the entire county. Along with, if Mr Melcher is right, a ready supply of boot and purse material. And I hear alligator tastes like chicken. Or maybe it's wild hickory nuts.
Eric Hines
Alligator tastes like grease in my experience, but maybe I haven’t run into a good cook of it.
Great to hear that you’re holding up, Tex.
I grew up in tropical rain forest, and I don't remember rainfall nearly that heavy. Hurricanes formed nearby but they flew the other direction, across the ocean.
We'd love to take some off your hands, out here in the West. Good you're so prepared it's not a great concern.
Droughts scare me more than floods, if only because my living space (stilt house) is fairly immune, and even our ground-floor garage has never been seriously threatened. This area is feast-or-famine: we're usually in either a drought or a tropical wave. Our average annual rainfall is only 35 inches, but it's not a nice bell-curve, it tends to be either 25 (if not 15) or 45 (if not 55), depending on the luck of the draw on tropical systems. When we were building in 2005, we got 55 inches of rain in 5 months, 10 and 15 inches at a time. The city of Houston, where I grew up, also quite often gets these crazy rains: in the late 90s, Tropical Storm Allison dropped over 20 inches in a week on our house, and we weren't even the hardest hit in the county. Then there was Hurricane Harvey, of course, which hit Rockport with maybe 12 inches (chicken feed), but dropped 60 inches in some areas around Houston, a truly unimaginable amount of rain. My sister, just south of Houston, got 45 inches in one day in the 1970s, in what I thought was the maximum possible daily rainfall before Harvey showed me otherwise.
JJM--Shoot, if the FedEx drivers around here were impressed by gators, we'd never get any deliveries out here. We've eaten gator, which I found to be a little like shrimp. My primary objections are that it practically takes a chainsaw to butcher one, and the flesh continues to quiver for an alarming length of time after it's completely butchered and in a plastic storage bag. Puts me off my feed. Anyway, I wouldn't kill a gator unless it were attacking a person or pet--or we were starving.
Up in the Panhandle, we got three inches in two hours on Wednesday morning. In town. In the decades I've lived here, I have never seen a debris line that high in my neighborhood park. Up over the sidewalks, sure. Several feet up into yards on one side of the road, and 50' or so into the park on the other side? Ah, no.
Methinks the storm drains need a wee bit of attention.
LittleRed1
Post a Comment