Rain, Rain, Go Away!

August has been an impossibly rainy month in my area so far, with flooding so bad even indoor events are getting rained out.

How bad is it?  As I reported here back in 2013, the undevelopable wooded lot in my neighborhood with a brook running down the middle of it was taken over by the neighborhood and developed into a sitting park with flower gardens and a bench and called Waverly Park after an adjacent street (Waverly Place).  I'd hoped to take some pictures of it after having helped get it into shape this year.

Unfortunately, these aren't the sort of pictures I had planned to take.

This is the park viewed from the south after a flash flood hit it on Saturday, August 11 (yesterday).

Here is is again, viewed from the west.

I have never seen it this bad before.  A rain storm in my area usually means that this brook becomes a whitewater rapid.  But not a lake!

The streets adjacent to the park were not affected, and when I went by later in the evening, the flood waters had receded to the point where the bench was accessible.  By the morning, the flood had completely subsided. Fortunately, none of the gardens we planted this year were flooded out.  But there was still foam on the water where the brook enters the culvert under the bench.

Twenty eighteen is turning out to be some year, isn't it?  Four winter nor'easters in as many weeks, a derecho in May knocking out my power for seven hours and change, now this!  And in the outside world there are fires in California and in Sweden above the Arctic Circle while the Iberian peninsula bakes in 116-Fahrenheit-degree heat.  

I tried to stop talking about the weather on my blog for the past few months, but I couldn't contain myself any longer.  Neither can the brook in our neighborhood contain itself.  And the only nation on the planet to razz the Paris Agreement on climate change can expect more of the same from sea to polluted sea.

Did I happen to mention that more flash flooding is possible tomorrow?