There’s been some rain here in California—maybe you’ve heard. Our “storm events” here in San Diego are usually either several days of continuous misty rain with the intensity of falling dust or a several-hour sky-purge of Biblical proportions. This storm started with several days of mist and ended with multiple waves of heavy rain that let up to tease you into thinking it was over then…BAM! More rain!
How does a semi-arid desert deal with rain? We lucked out that it was light at first, so the ground could drink up as much possible before vomiting it out into the ocean. By yesterday, after six days of rain, our stadium was flooded, the Riverwalk Golf Course was flooded, the floodplains in Mission Valley were flooded and our garage was flooded. That last one was dealt with swiftly by my wife and a wet-vac while I sat in my dry office and made commiserating sounds on the phone. This morning the sun was out. Sun! In San Diego! Everything outside is beyond drenched, it’s like a shipwrecked cat pulling itself from the surf after a nor’easter. Even our fence couldn’t wait to get rid of excess moisture in the morning sun.
All this makes me wish for some massive rain storage tanks. With a one-time investment we could have enough winter rain to water our garden through spring. This is, of course, the perfect time for Uncle F#@k-Up to start thinking about rain collection: right after the biggest rain event in 30 years. Once I get the tanks all set up it will be spring and we’ll go without rain until winter 2011 which will be the driest on record. Just watch. What does our fence say about this? It just sighs out more vapor. Oh…Uncle…F#%@k…Up…
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Neat pics! 🙂
Man, a rain collection set up really would be awesome, huh? We’re so accustomed to not getting any rain that nobody planned for that!
We have rain water tanks, two, that are just used for the garden. Our sprinkler system is connected to it. We also connect a pipe to the washing machine and use the grey water on the garden.
We are also flooding, and our tanks have been overflowing for weeks. Only months ago we were down to using buckets to water the garden…as they say in Australia, every drought is ended by the flood, and we are so flooding right now. Enough.
Cool pictures! I hope things are gradually drying out. We were hit with this same storm a few days later and parts of Phoenix actually received some snow.