Monday, February 4, 2008

Flash Floods!

We've had rain for 4 days and nights with about a 15 minute break a couple days ago. And again right now, it's finally let up for the past 25-30 minutes. We're not talking comforting pitter-patter of rain on the roof here: this is monsoon-like deluges! Someone up there has turned all the firehoses on full blast and walked away and totally forgot about 'em. The kind where you actually hear the silence when it stops.

On Saturday we drove in to Hilo - in the downpour - and noticed on the way all the ditches beginning to overflow, people's yards flooding, a few fire engines pumping out a couple homes. Once in Hilo itself, we saw the big drain canal gushing with muddy brown water creating standing waves! Many of the streets downtown were closed, even the highway. These are still closed too, with 3 feet of water slowly receding, and high surf crashing in to take its place. We went above Hilo to Rainbow Falls, a picturesque waterfall usually, but this time it was a torrential monster. We could actually hear it from the parking lot, still inside the car! And it was enormous and scary! Such raw power of Nature!

There has been much damage over the weekend from this storm, and it's not done with us yet! They say this stalled storm will linger over the islands through Thursday at least. That's as far as the forecast goes, so who knows what'll come next? But we are all safe and sound in our neighborhood. Only one little drip in the studio that Mike managed to fix by rescrewing one screw so the plastic seal connected properly. And lots of extra soil being washed into our driveway that I'll probably scrape off and add to my garden beds. Hey, I'll take what I can get! :-)

Oops, here comes the rain again. Excuse me, I need to run around closing up windows again!
Sure beats shoveling snow and scraping ice!! ;-)

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