We had quite the storm hit the area last night.
One of those ones where it blows up upon you fast and hard. The winds are roaring. The lightning and thunder is flashing. The rain is pouring hard enough against the windows that you have to check to see if it's hail or not that's hitting them.
...It was hail at one point. But not the entire time.
And then like 20 minutes later the storm is gone. Roaring on.
I hadn't thought much about it beyond concern for my roomie who was coming back from an event she'd been at. So I'd texted her to warn her about the storm. How heavy the rain was. That there was hail. To be careful driving.
I didn't think much more about it after that though.
We've had heavy rains before.
... ... ...
But not heavy rains after a recent fire on the mountain above my home.
I had heard a ton of sirens earlier on.
More than normal. That lasted longer.
But I kinda chalked it up to bad accident.
Because like... I live in an area where there's an intersection that likes to have accidents.
I also live above a neighborhood that gets a lot of domestic calls.
I also live near an easy access to the highway...where more accidents happen.
So like sirens aren't out of the ordinary.
So yah I didn't realize anything was out of the ordinary....
Until my roomie got home and was like "Hey, did you know that the bottom of our street is closed?"
Which.
Huh?
She wanted to know if I'd received any alerts about a disaster ... which no. My phone had been silent.
But she had had to find an alternate route to get home because our normal way was blocked off. No access whatsoever.
It took a bit of midnight sleuthing on the Internet before we discovered that there had been a mudslide.
Landslide? It seemed to be mostly made of mud.
But regardless.
The draw where the fire had happened a couple of weeks ago?
Yah. The sudden heavy rain fall did not help all that loose ashy soil.
I saw a report that 1" of rain and fallen in like that 20-30 minute period.
I later saw news reports that our street had flooded with water up to 6 inches high in some places.
Regardless. Debris, Mud, and Ash had come flowing down from the mounting into a berm and over and into a Construction patch that lead directly into a Church...piling mud up to 5 feet high against it's walls.
Some other houses experienced slight flooding in their basements I heard.
But the church took the brunt of it from my understanding.
And two of the main roads in the area got covered in the mudslide....some leading all the way down somewhere on State affecting that road as well...though they cleared up that street a lot faster than they did the other two roads.
I was told that they moved 960 truck loads of debris today from that muddy area of the Church. Over 13,440 tons of debris.
They had hundreds of volunteers and a lot of construction equipment over there working to help clear up the mess.
The poor church building is going to be closed for the foreseeable future.
There is the obvious landscape damage, but there's also HVAC, Electrical and apparently some Structural Damage as well.
Which is kinda crazy.
Crazy to see how much can come down from the mountains when you get a heavy storm and there's no vegetation up there anymore to hold the soil in place because it all burned.
Luckily we're in a bit of a lull here with the storms.
But there's definitely more of a concern now that this will happen again whenever the next storm hits.
Though hopefully it's not as crazy.
We're told that this storm was a 10 year storm. But with the burn scar on the mountain it exacerbated the problem and turned it into a 25 year storm sort of problem.
Overall I'm just grateful that it didn't impact our home. And it barely affected us roomies. I mean we did have to detour from our usual routes to get to work as the main road was still closed this morning. It didn't open up again until after dinner time....and is set to close first thing again in the morning so that the construction crews can continue working on clearing more of the mud away.
Hopefully tomorrow they can get the roads fully cleared enough that we don't have to worry about any more road detours. Though I expect the cleanup at the church is going to take a bit longer.
Overall I'm just grateful that no one was hurt and everyone was able to stay safe.
Until you next find these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!
-Sarnic Dirchi
No comments:
Post a Comment