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12:30 p.m. - 2003-05-06
Severe Weather and Flooding
There's nothing like a Severe Weather Event to make you forget the little everyday problems of life. I feel like disaster planning is becoming a major hobby for me.

What a freakin' night/morning. I am totally wiped out. We had bad weather all day yesterday, and in the evening they issued a tornado watch. When we went to bed at about 11, it was storming pretty badly - badly enough that I didn't sleep. Instead I lay awake worrying that trees were going to fall on the house or we'd get hit by lightning.

At 2:30 in the morning, I gave up, and went to check if our drain system was holding up. The first thing I did was look out the window. I was greeted by a frightening sight.

"Hey Bruce! You need to get up!" I yelled. "There's a river in the front yard!"

There was, in fact, a river going through the front yard. We have a drainage ditch maintained by the town, and it had obviously reached its limits. Fortunately we are on a slope, and the storm drains were functioning, so the house was completely safe. But it was pretty unnerving to see all that water.

Everything else seemed ok, but I couldn't go back to sleep. Just too much thunder and the sky was lighting up like a Van der Graaf generator. About 5 am I finally dozed off.

At 7 am the tornado sirens started.

Bruce was shaving, and rushed out of the bathroom with his chin covered with shave cream and his razor in his hand. We turned on the radio, and the Arnold Schwartzenager voice of the Emergency Broadcast system informed us that the storms were North of us, so while Bruce wiped off his face I pulled on some clothes and went downstairs to turn on the battery powered TV.

Poor Burma - she freaked out when she heard the sirens, and hid in the stairwell. It actually is a pretty good place to be if a tornado goes through.

Annoyingly, even though the sirens are technically supposed to go off for a few minutes at the start of the watch, and then not go off again till there is an all-clear, they just kept going off about every 15 minutes, implying that new alerts were being issued. And the sky was as dark as if it were twilight. It was nerve wracking.

According to the TV, we were out of the range of several tornadoes which touched down just North of us. However, there was so much rain coming down that parts of Huntsville were (and still are) flooding. Weirdly, where we used to live in Five Points is flooded! I'm glad I didn't bow to the peer pressure to buy a house there.

Sadly, while we were watching TV, a fatality was reported. Someone was trying to drive their car through a flooded area and got swept away. Why do people try to drive in this?

The little river in front of the house was at a steady flow, but the house itself did fine. Bruce and I carefully checked this out before we bought the house. We are the first house completely out of the Aldrich Creek flood area. There is no record ever of floods going up this far. And the home inspector said the drain system is perfectly adequate for the house. So we felt pretty safe.

After about an hour though, we noticed people stopping their cars near our house and walking down hill on the cross street from us, so we put on our raingear and went to see what was happening. The creek had flooded. It has happened before. In fact, a few years ago it flooded so badly that they had to move some houses out of there, the town was sued for not providing adaquate drainage, etc.

It looks like there will be a few more lawsuits. That water was pretty high, and obviously was flowing over the nice carpeting inside some of the houses.

It seemed like there was nothing we could so do we went back in, after telling the police blocking the road that if they needed anything they could knock on our door. It seemed like the neighborly thing to do. Just as we were heading inside, one of the neighborhood cats came whipping up the street at full throttle. It ran down into the storm drain, then came up, ran across the street and ran into another storm drain.

I was pleased to see several people were concerned, including one of the police officers. I have actually seen cats do this before here, and checked it out one day. It's actually pretty safe for them because the storm drains are constructed with little niches and overhangs that they can get into. Barring an apocalypse size flood, it really is ok for them to be down in there. But it was nice to see people so concerned.


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