Saturday, May 31, 2008

Flooding in Ames, IA

With all the focus on severe weather, rain was the main damaging phenomena last night. 4 inches in some locations in 1 day. Couple that with probably as much snow as they have seen since 2001, meant soil moisture and probably the whole water table was higher than normal. Add a few rain events, and BAM ... floods. My favorite is the community pool construction site ... in a known flood plain ... which has consistently flooded for at least the last 3 wet seasons ... totally underwater.

With all the new construction, including the new Walmart which accounted for some kind of flood, we are at increasing infrastructure risk from what can be aptly described as regular, even somewhat regular events.

Here in the Tri-cities in Winter we saw a 5 inch snowfall ... last one was in 2001 I think. Pretty incredible for this neck of the woods, not to mention the 300 days of sun promise I heard before moving here. It has rained so many days (granted not much falls) since we moved in.

We shall see what the damage in Ames does on Monday ... but gear up for Tuesday when the next batch of rain is ready to go through.

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