Boy, I wish I knew how to swim!
I took lessons many years ago, but never really mastered the skill. I sink to the bottom and walk to shore!
For the last few weeks, Texas has been wet. That weird stuff falling from the sky is totally unnatural in Texas, and no one here really knows what to do with it. The streets get wet and slippery, drivers run into each other. Gee, it feels like a blizzard in Nebraska!
The news said that we have had enough rain in Texas this month to cover the entire state in a foot of water. Yikes! That has caused huge problems around here and thrust Texas into the national news!
We have been in the middle of a drought for many years. Lake Travis, about 30 miles west of Austin, is so low that all those megabuck lake-front houses now have their boats sitting on dirt with the water, yards away from the docks. There is land visible in the middle of the lake no one has seen for decades!
Grass in many yards has died off, or gone dormant. Brown is the new green! We are not allowed to do those simple things like wash the car, or water the yard. It has been a hard time for anyone growing anything!
Boom, Pow!
A week ago, while cousin Bill was visiting us from Wyoming, we were sitting in the family room watching an old movie (John Wayne in "Donovan's Reef") when we heard the rains start to howl. The wind was whipping around and the rain got really fierce. Then we heard a loud crash, saw a lightning bolt hit nearby, and everything got dark! We grabbed flashlights and candles, gathered the cat near the kitchen pantry where we would duck if things got much worse, and waited.
We waited for some time, hoping the power would come back on so we could watch the rest of the movie, but that did not happen. Instead, we went for 14 hours with no power. We gave up on the movie, and when things quieted down, we all went to bed in the dark, I mean really dark. There were no lights anywhere, except for the glow of the flashlights we were using to move around in the house!
Microburst Time
What was going on outside was not visible until the next morning. Our house and yard looked pretty normal when we got up. The rains had quit, but still we had no power. Bill and I decided to do a reconaissance mission around the neighborhood to see what things looked like.
Our house looked fine, and the neighbors on either side looked OK as well. There were a few tree limbs down, but nothing out of the ordinary for such a storm. We have a canvas-topped metal cover on part of our back porch, held down with a pile of bricks on each leg, and it was just fine.
But one block to the north, things took a serious turn for the worse. The neighbor at the beginning or our block had several big branches down, and across the street, whole trees were toppled.
One more block to the north and the street looked like a war zone. There were about eight big power company trucks on that street, with crews in the back yards of a row of houses where power lines went through to service our neighborhood. The scrambled trees took out the power lines, which accounted for our lack of power. It took quite a bit of work to clean out the broken trees and restring the power lines, but that eventually got done.
We decided that we had been hit by a "microburst". Formally that is a localized chunk of violent wind, known to have caused airplanes to crash when they hit one. These things are not exactly tornadoes, but they are close. (Some of our neighbors do think we got hit by a tornado, but it was very small if it happened at all). The area affected by this burst was about six square blocks. In that area, there were trees down, fences down, and water everywhere!
We managed to get through all of that with minimal loss. We ended up pitching a lot of food in the refrigerator, since things in the freezer managed to thaw out over that amount of time.
Neighbors Rebuilding
A week later, it is still raining a bunch, but the area is recovering. There are crews all over, cutting up the fallen trees and rebuilding the downed fences. A few are working on repairing or replacing roofs that have been damaged as well. All in all, we got through it in pretty good shape.
Others were not so lucky! Those, you need to pray for!
Texas Flooding
Texas sits on rock. In Texas, what we call a post hole digger, you probably know as a jackhammer! I first discovered that fact when I tried to put up the flagpole in my front yard. Six inches down, I hit granite! It took hours with a metal spike to break through the rock deep enough to put up my flag!
What that means is that when it rains, there is no soaking in going on. Instead, the water simply runs off to the lowest place it can find. Usually this ends up in normally dry creek beds, which quickly turn into raging streams that cover the roads. About a half mile to our north such a creek often fills up to a depth of over six feet and floods over the main road through our neighborhood. Cars do not dare drive through those floods, since the water can sweep them off of the road!
The first summer we lived in this house a storm resulted in a flood over this same road about two miles to the north. A teenage driver tried to drive through the water to get to a gas station about a block further up the road. His truck stalled in the water, probably because he was going too fast. He opened up his door, and stepped into the water, and was swept under the truck where he drowned! That water was only about a foot deep!
In Wimberly, Texas, about 30 miles from here, a small river flows through the middle of the town. Wimberly is famous for its many quaint shops and is a popular stop on drives through the hill country west of Austin. This storm turned that small river into a raging flood that wiped our dozens of homes, and swept away dozens of people as well. They are still searching for many of those missing in all of this.
We have friends who live there, but they got through OK. I have another friend who flies radio-controlled drones with cameras on them for a living. I suspect he is down there now, since they are using these drones to search for victims where people cannot go.
You can see all of this on CNN. It is a scary thing to live through!
Memories of Flooding
I have seen this kind of thing several times in my life, and it is scary! After strong storms, I have driven to low water crossings I have used in my drives around the area to see how they look, and been stunned by what I saw. One crossing I used to go over on my way to Texas State University several years ago, turned into a 50 yard wide raging river that was carrying trees, sheds, all kind of things, by me at over 40 miles per hour! It was amazing to see.
Albuquerque Floods
New Mexico has lan much like Texas, except the rock under the ground is probably lava from old volcanoes. When it rains there, water does the same thing it doe sin Texas, heads for the lowest spots, and ends up flooding everything on tthe way. In Albuquerque, the low spot is the Rio Grande River, and the city has constructed a number of drainage ditches through town to handle the occasional floods. Those work pretty well, but west of town things are different.
Albuquerque sits in a valley with the ground sloping up toward the mountains in the east, and to the top of a mesa in the west. West of that mesa sits another valley where a dry river once flowed through. Normally that area is just desert land, where cattle ranchers try to raise their stock. One day, we had a huge rain storm sweep through the area. Nothing much happened in town, but on the news that afternoon, they had pictures taken from the side of Interstate 40, where a rancher had been caught in a flash flood. He was standing on the roof of his truck abount an inch above the raging mess of water that was everywhere around him.
The rancher told the news folks later that he looked out the window of his truck and thought he saw a dust storm approaching fast. Too late, he realized that was a wall of water. He scrambled up to the roof of his truck as the water rose in muinutes to fully submerge the truck. Drivers on the Interstate saw this and called for help. In the end, the Air Force sent over a rescue helicopter to pluck hin to safety, where he stood and watched the water and talked to the news folks! Pretty amazing, and far too common in those parts of the country!
Omaha Floods
When I first moved to Omaha, Nebraska, the Missouri River was flooding in a big way. I rented a Cessna 150 and flew over the river between Omaha and Kansas City, and had a hard time finding the river itself. The entire river valley was under water. Even the Interstate road was covered in many spots! It made me glad I lived on much higher ground!
Missouri Flooding
Then there was the time I took my grandparents on a drive to Silver Dollar City near Branson Missouri. That was the time I was working as a co-op student at McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, and drove my dad's mother down to visit my mother's dad on his farm. That was the only time these two folks ever met, even though they only lived about 200 miles apart!
We were driving down a road after rain storms had passed through the area. The road crossed a river over a bridge, then followed the river along the side of a steep hill to another bridge where it crossed back over the river.
I remember crossing the first bridge and noticing that the river was very full and moving fast. I looked in the rear view mirror as I drove along that hill and saw water rising up and flowing over the road behind me! I saw the second bridge coming up and stepped on the gas to get to it as fast as I could. I was pretty sure we were OK, so I did not tell my grandparents what I saw.
As we crossed the second bridge, I saw a bunch of state police cars blocking the bridge. The road was officially closed, but not from the side I came from. As we passed that blockaide, the road was fully covered with water. Close call! And, one that stayed with me for years. I have not forgotten that image of water rising up to cover the road. I do not want to think what would have happened if I had been just a little bit slower and getting out of that mess!
A Minor Fun Flood
I have one more memory of a minor flood that was kind of fun. When I was in graduate school at Virginia Tech, I raced in motorcycle enduros, races where you ride at a fixed speed of 24 miles-per-hour for about 100 miles over anything but paved roads. We went up hills, through forests, and even crossed rivers on the bikes!
I was riding in the Lonesome Pine Enduro, a two day even based in Abington, Virginia, that covered 350 miles of beautiful mountain country in the far southwest part of the state. There were over 400 riders in that event.
Somewhere in the early part of the first day, they had us cross a small river, about 20 yards wide, but not very deep. In fact, it had been almost dry when they laid out the race course. However, a few days before the race, it had rained a bunch, and the river was up several feet. Not so deep that riders could not cross, but deep enough, and fast enough, to be a challenge.
My Kawasaki 350 had not problem getting through the crossing. I had made sure it was waterproof, and the air intake was high up under the seat, just in case I had to do something like this. I was fine!
But a rider who had been with me for several miles was not so lucky. She got to the middle of the river crossing and fell off. I happened to see this, as did a couple of other riders, so we all jumped back into the river to help her out.
We got to her quickly enough, and she was standing almost hip deep in the river, just looking down. She could not find her bike! The water was so muddy from the rains that none of us could see through it. So, all four of us started stomping around in the water, hoping to step on the morotcycle. Eventually, we found it several yards down river from where she fell off!
We dragged the bike to shore, and we all took off our boots to empty out the water. Then, we flipped her bike upside down, pulled the spark plug out, and turned the back wheel to turn the engine over, By doing this we pumped out all the water that had managed to get into the engine. A few minutes later we had her bike running, then we all jumped back on our bikes, and headed off to complete the race! We had to make up lost time, but that was part of the fun of the race!
I managed to complete that race, but my arms were so sore I could hardly move them for a week. Try standing up on a bouncing motorcycle for over 350 miles pulling on the clutch lever and working the brakes and see how you feel! That is a glorious memory!
Hey, the sun is shining, and Texas is drying out!
Time to go to school. Today is the first day of the Summer Session!
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