Rainy days

Some of you may know that our part of South Texas has been enduring a severe drought for a couple of years. It was so bad this year that most of the cotton, sorghum, and corn farmers didn't even plant crops because the ground was so dry. I say "was so bad" because it has been particularly rainy for the past couple of weeks and I think that, since hurricane season started here on June 1st, the drought is officially over.

If there was any doubt left in mind that this was the case, it was erased yesterday when we had between 4 and 6 inches of rain (depending where you were in the city) in about an hour and a half. That is bad news because there are spots around town that tend to flood...one of them is the half of the University that I work on and others are all of the underpasses that cut across South Padre Island Drive, the superhighway that cuts the city in half. And this was bad news for me because I have to cross under it to get home.

So at work we all trooped out to the loading dock to watch it thunder and rain and watch the water rise in the parking lot. Traffic got snarled because so many underpasses and roads were full of water, people trying to drive through it slowly, and (naturally) a few people trying to drive through it fast and make a big spray. My librarian friend from Seattle laughed at us all and told us that in Seattle, the only time everybody troops outside to look at the weather is when the sun comes out, NOT when it rains.

All ended well (except for a few cars with a bit of water in them because they were parked in the lower lying parts of the parking lot) and I thought you would enjoy a before and after picture.

This is what the parking lot behind the library usually looks like (on a rainy day).

This is what it looked like at about 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon.

And this is what we all eventually did to get to our cars and go home!




P.S. I've just been told not to make any lunch plans off campus because (yep) it's about to start raining again!