Saturday August 13th was our turn. We woke up to thunder and lightning and a downpour of torrential rain that just wouldn't let up. Here is a picture of the backyard where you can see the rain coursing off the roof. All of my rain collection barrels had long since filled and overflowed. Rainwater had flooded the blueberry bushes and tangerine trees and was inching closer to the house. Fortunately our home is located on a high place and has never been in danger of flooding.
Here is a photo looking out of the front door. The rain kept falling and falling and falling...
And here is a view from the side yard, looking toward the neighbor's home. It looks like a lake.
As far as determining how much rain we got, I'm afraid our rain gauge wasn't of much help. It only holds 5 inches and I dumped it out twice, but both times, it was full with water splashing out of the top. So it was at least ten inches. There was a 5 gallon bucket nearby that was full. That was 15 inches. So by looking at that, it was at least 15 inches of rainfall on Saturday, perhaps a bit more, but we'll go with that. A friend of mine who lives about 15 minutes to the east of us got 21 inches of rain, with water coming dangerously close to his home.
An interesting thing - up to August 12th we had a 29.8 inches of rainfall year to date. On August 13th we had a whopping 15 inches of rain - almost half of the rainfall amount for the whole year in one day! That is pretty crazy.
While we were very fortunate in not having water damage, this precipitation put a damper on the gardening activities for a while. I was planning on putting my squash and cucumber starts out in the garden and planting a row of green beans. That will have to wait for a while until things dry up.
No comments:
Post a Comment