Flood Warning

Monsoon season is unquestionably here. It rained all last night, and has been pouring all morning. It's not supposed to stop until late tonight, by which point I can't imagine what the city is going to look like. The main problem is that we've had rain for the last few days, so the ground is totally saturated. The news stations keep saying that this isn't normal monsoon season weather, which makes me feel a little bit better. I couldn't imagine having this much rain every summer for the next 3-4 years.

Thankfully we live at the top of a little hill, and our street is one of the very few that actually has a storm drain. I'm a little worried about some areas where the rain is pooling around our foundation, but there's not a whole lot to do about it at this point.

Here's a photo from our local newspaper showing a street on our side of town:



Keep your fingers crossed that we all stay dry indoors today!

***EDITED 12:05 pm--the garage ceiling is leaking, and I think it's coming in from the balcony off our bedroom. This storm is just crazy. Some streets have up to 5 feet of water right now, and the rain isn't stopping. We've gotten over 4.6 inches of rain in the last 24 hours, most of that in the last 12 hours. I'm officially freaked out.

***EDITED 12:45 pm--I just saw some footage of one of my favorite grocery stores on the news. The store is completely flooded with mud and water. I was just there yesterday! This is a crazy storm, and I'll be VERY surprised if J is able to make it home tonight. There are just too many flooded streets between the hospital and our home.

***EDITED 2:30 pm--J is coming home. He's going to go all the way up noth and then loop back around to the West side of the city where we live. I wish he'd just stay overnight at the hospital, but he's determined to get back here. NBC is reporting that the river has overflowed just south of the city.

Here are a few pictures I took of the newscast I've been glued to all day. We are so, SO lucky that our street has a storm drain. I can't even imagine how bad things would be otherwise.


This is actually just down the street from where we used to live--very scary!


One section of the freeway, not too far from here


One of the scarier images--this is a section of the freeway Juan takes every day to get to work. If he'd left a few hours later this morning, he would still be stuck right here.


Our backyard--you can see that we've got some minor flooding on the patio, but nothing near what we could have. I feel enormously blessed that we're not having more problems. Given how many inches of rain have fallen in the last 48 hours (nearly 6 inches!!!) it's amazing that this is as bad as it's gotten.

***EDITED 4:30 pm--Juan got home around an hour ago, and thankfully the rain has slowed down considerably. The streets are still bad all over town, and the news is predicting another 1-3 inches tonight, but the worst appears to be over. It's been 30 years since El Paso had a storm anything like this. All I know is that the last 24 hours have been worse than even the hurricane that we lived through in Maryland back in 2003. I never expected to see a storm like this after moving to the desert.