After the Flood

It is the following Tuesday after the great South Carolina deluge. In Columbia, we're seeing sunshine for the first time in about five days. Helicopters are pretty much a constant overhead as news stations, government agencies, and Lord-knows-who-else survey the scene from the air.

I live in northeast Columbia with my family and the destruction is not so obvious here. I suppose we must be on relatively high ground and so we weren't flooded out as much as the rest of the city. From Saturday night through midday Monday, we had a pretty steady rain. It wasn't storming, or even a particularly hard rain, just constant--especially Sunday (Oct 4). In fact, it's been several years since I've seen rain that constant, falling in big, heavy drops. It wasn't really scary while it was happening; more depressing.

Outside of the news reports, I would not have noted this rain as being anything out of the ordinary (we went to grocery in the midst of it, which isn't far from home) except for when I got up early Monday morning to feed the dog. The water running through the "ditch" that is our abbreviated back yard was up and rushing, though it did not reach the house or even cover the back porch. The french drain was able to handle the excess and channel it out to the street.

We suffered no flood damage and never even lost electricity (as of this writing), so we were pretty fortunate. Judging from the news, a number of streets and portions of the Interstates (I-20 and I-77) around us were closed. Dams and canals were breeched causing a lot of flooding in the southeast part of the city and keeping schools and businesses closed into the first of the work-week. Evacuations were forced in some areas. It seems we are on a high island of relative stability in the midst of a lot of calamity.

Out-of-state family and friends have been texting and calling to verify our well-being, so let me say that, at this point, we're OK. Our unknowns right now are: how long will my wife's workplace be closed, and, will we experience a loss of supplies (the grocery store was being cleared of bread and water) before this is "over."

The news media is calling this a "1000 year flooding event." From a statistical standpoint that's probably true, but the implication is of a natural event and I think there's little doubt of the human input. Some commentators will even concede that this event, like the California drought, is a byproduct of "climate change" or even "global warming." I think that's true, but there is more to the story.

All this was presaged by the passage of Hurricane Joaquin, which was at first "predicted" to make landfall on the US east coast and move over the Carolinas. Instead, it battered the Bahamas and then moved out over the Atlantic where it continues to weaken. It is apparently supposed to have contributed someway to bringing the huge load of moisture over the Carolinas that fell in the intense rains of the last few days. I say "apparently" because it looks to me like the two weather systems are pretty far separated.

So was there a causal connection between the hurricane and the rain? Probably of some sort, but I don't trust the Weather Channel to tell us the straight poop. I think the rain dumped on South Carolina was basically "stolen" from California. If you have trouble believing that weather is manipulated, I suggest you spend some time researching here .

Long ago, a Sumerian city-king (Gilgamesh, aka: Noah) survived a contrived flood and saw his thankfulness and hope for the future expressed as a rainbow. After our flood, I stood on my back porch in cooler air and looked up into slightly less pale blue skies and watched the SAG trails spreading into cirrus clouds.