Historic Rain Event

This is one of the many transport helicopters. The tree there is part of our little backyard. The couple of landing strips to the left of the tree is the local airport about 5 miles away. The helicopters fly all day ferrying people from Jamestown and other mountain towns and areas to the airport.

These smaller copters were used more for spotting people in trouble and problems in roads and power lines. They would fly up to people’s decks and see if they needed help [so we heard. We decided that it was a bad thing to wave to them because then they might think we needed assistance]. There was / is no way to contact people, with roads out, power out, and if you had terminated your landline phone service….[Comcast Phone apparently requires electricity to work]. So if you needed help it was talk to your neighbors, if you can, if they are there, or wave down a copter.

Sunday morning, and things looked ominous. We got another 2 inches later in the day. We couldn’t really see much damage from where we are except a poor elementary school which was now sitting in the middle of a lake [which has since drained away]. We did see some damage right below our storage unit and we had to wonder / worry. Was their address still 44565 Broadway? Were they still on the West side of the street? Apparently they are with a few cautionary warnings about what we might expect when we can get down there.

Power came on last [Sunday] night after going off early Thursday morning at about 12:50 [halfway through Colbert’s interview with Sheryl Crow].

We are on the top of a tall ridge, so we did not experience any flooding, per se, but our house is built to withstand snow, not rain. The weather station about a 100 yards [meters] away as the crow flies and about 200 yards below us reported over 17 inches of rain in the last 5 days. This is approximately a years worth of precipitation for us.

We got back from the gym [which already had water about 1 foot to 2 feet deep in the parking lot and which was starting to flood inside in the weight room] about 9pm Wednesday. Things looked fine on the way up, durig the final stretch of road to our home, just dodging a couple of rocks that had fallen on the road [because they get loosened by all the rain]. But they closed this road [Linden] permanently at 10:30 and a lot of poor folks here were stranded away from their homes. Several parts of that road did subsequently get washed away, repaired, washed away again… rinse and repeat. And several roads branching off that road are going to take a lot longer to repair.

It poured water on us all day Thursday and most of Friday, and it was the loudest we had ever heard it. We started measuring the inches / hour in our primitive way by sitting in the kitchen nook and estimating how loud it was. Usually, for most rains, we do not hear anything at all. Thursday we had to almost shout over it. Our conclusion was, that there were a lot of large drops in that rain [it rained another 2 inches Sunday, hard, but they were little drops, and did not make much noise].

We have a local dam, recently built and which is used for our water supply, and Saturday, when we got out to the backyard deck, we could hear it quite well [a new ‘water feature’] and see it, way down below where it was now visibly snaking into town .They were letting the maximum amount of water out of it they could in a controlled manner. If the water had crested the dam that would have been not so good, seems to me, as erosion would have quickly caused massive amounts of water to pour out, taking out the fire house and many homes on the way down as well as many down in the flats.

OK. Being without electricity sucks. We are still without gas [heating and hot water – and may not have gas for several months]. The ground shifts when it gets wet, breaking gas lines – and water lines too but we have been lucky so far.

Our smartphones lasted a day or so [we forgot to fully charge them when we got back Wednesday night doh! and they were both on yellow batteries] and they would always be BLASTING audible warnings about Flash Flood Warnings [i..e it is still raining], which we, you know, could kind of guess since it was still raining. They would blast these warnings during the time when most people would likely be sleeping [especially me. Hey, if you have no power, it is best to sleep from 8pm to about 7am unless you LIKE banging into walls a lot] so I finally put my phone in airplane mode.

What we needed:

Candles. Had a few but only about a weeks worth. Oh, and something to light the candles with.

Flashlights and lanterns. We only had a little flashlight sent to Neli several years ago by happy customer [Boomhauer]

A charger for the smartphones: We tried to save ours for emergencies. What we needed was one for the car and one that is a manual crank [in case the car is damaged or if you do not have a car]. We have a landline phone, which worked great, but we would call emergency services and their automatic message would just point us to a website and / or local news briefings. Yeah. This was great.

Canned food. We usually stock up for Winter but this is summer. We had a lot of cheese, a giant Costco box of Raisin Bran … couple of beers… and lots of random stuff. Raw eggs anyone?

Water. We had 9 gallons but we filled up the tub with water right away – to use for the toilets or other emergencies.

Battery-powered radio. This would have been great. Music. News. Other human voices. This relic is a sadly useful thing.

I figure we all are going to go through these Big Weather Events more and more – and so it is best that we all kind of take stock of what we might want.

As far as the rescue and utility personal and the national guard, they seem to be doing awesome and working their butts off. I think there is a problem with our so called leaders, however, and largely because they are driven by the dominant paradigm that says it is better to spend trillions to kill a lot of people in proxy wars for the oil companies instead of on protecting and defending the citizens of the country from the temper tantrums of Mother Nature. From Katrina to Sandy to this ‘rain event’. From what I know of the Army Corps of Engineers, they can do magic; at least if they can just be mobilized in greater numbers here at home. You know, where the people paying the bills live? [I am mostly thinking of New Orleans and New England. I think we will do OK in the Front Range. We have been preparing for a 100-year flood here for decades – at least in Boulder – especially since the Big Thompson Flood].

Hard to tell if this was a climate change event. From what I have seen [which isn’t much, we just got power last night] is that the moist warm air stream up the Gulf of Mexico lasted a several weeks longer than is usual [we had a bunch of very hot days], and met up with the typical cold, autumnal air stream down from Canada.

OK. Back to your regularly scheduled out-of-control audiophile theater.