It's so nice to be awakened at the butt crack of dawn naturally instead of by a deluge. Or by warrant waving FBI agents.
Since that very wet morning two weeks ago, the people in the region still with cable have kept it on the weather channel to catch glimpses of what might be left of their homes and to stay up on the latest rain forecast. With each forecast, anxiety rises like the creek.
I believe there have been two official flash flood watches since the great flood of '22, but I think they were based more on anxiety than the actual chance of flood causing rain. It should be noted we were under several flash flood warnings on July 27-28.
The question is, will we just start getting flash flood watches every time there's more than a 50% chance of rain? Once upon a time that would have seemed ludicrous, but today things might be different.
I don't know if you've noticed, but we haven't had normal rainfall in a while. If you have a short memory, normal is not 4" per hour. I'm talking about those old soft summer rains, no more than a drizzle that sometimes lasted days without causing streams to rise at all. When's the last time you stood outside in a sprinkle that slowly turned into a steady soaking rain?
Today a sprinkle is the first 3 drops before the sky opens like a flood gate. Rains have become events in the hills. The drops are bigger, heavier, and sting a lot worse when they hit your skin. There's no longer a natural rhythm to the cycle.
We don't go from a light sprinkle, to a drizzle, to a steady soaking rain and back any more. We go from zero to downpour to zero again and hope the downpour is only for a couple minutes instead of a couple hours.
When's the last time you used the intermittent settings on your windshield wipers? I'm more often wishing there was a faster wiper setting than the ones I've got. I've had more driving while blinded by rain experiences in the last two summers than I had in the previous twenty years.
We've experienced enough of the microburst events by now to know isolated flooding is going to happen. It's been happening for several years in the region, with examples from the Road and Harless's Creek blowouts several years back to issues in Coal Run and Island Creek since.
Even the regularly forming Stillhouse Avenue Pond in Elkhorn City, a pretty benign recurrent flood in the grand scheme of things, is probably the result of exceptional microbursts of rain that far exceed what the storm drainage was built for seventy years ago.
The bottom line is it rains harder and faster now than it once did.
So it probably isn't unusual that our anxiety is high when we have even the slightest chance of rain around here. We've seen what can happen when a giant heavy rain event covers the region. Billions of dollars in damage, homes and businesses shattered, and 37 lives lost.
That's enough to make people pray for drought.