So, it turns out it was a total of about 5 inches of rain in less than 90 minutes. I think this is a picture of Regent Street, about 6 blocks from the lab, but downhill. A couple of apartment complex basements and underground parking garages ended up with 7 and 8 feet of water in them, so it looks like we were doing OK, despite the water spurting through cracks in the walls. No serious damage done to the Escalante Lab or to our house, which is mostly just cleaner.
Still, a little unsettling. Must be the monsoon season coming on.
4 comments:
Gah! Something very similar happened in my neck of the woods last September. The street in front of my house washed out and had knee-high standing water for a while. It drained away relatively quickly; the storm drains were just overwhelmed. Some landscaping timbers and mulch washed away in my yard, too.
What's up, Nature? You used to be cool!
Yeah. It's weird. An hour after the rain stopped, all the water had drained away and the sun came out. Like it had never happened.
Strangest thing I've seen in a while. Of course, it being Madison, I hear that some people were canoeing down Park St...
One thing you can say for Cornell: very little chance of catastrophic flooding.
But there has been flooding in downtown Ithaca. I remember one year when I was in college - it was in March, so the winter was kind of ending and there was still a good amount of snow on the ground. Then the weather warmed up and we had a large rainstorm, which melted the snow and added significant runoff of its own. That was the one time I remember Cornell closing in my time there due to a weather emergency. There was flooding on many downtown streets, and Tompkins County closed some roads in the area. Paul "Dr. Food" Seeber couldn't make it back home to Cortland, so we had to put him up in an empty room in Risley.
That's a major storm!!! We've been having lots of thunder and lightning but no catastrophic precipitation. My office was hit by lightning Saturday before last and the copier killed, among other, less expensive electronic assistants. Since we're on the 2nd floor, and I live on a hill, I think I would have rather dealt with flooding. :)
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