Gallivanting (in the rain)

The dogs are up for a drive to just about anywhere, rain or no rain.

From the Picasa album Tucson Rain, Floods and Washes 2009

Ack! I didn't post an entry yesterday, and now today's almost over as well! I have been taking a lot of pictures, though. Let's put a dent in the backlog! These are from Thursday, when it rained all day here, more than double the total rain that usually falls in the entire month of May. I took the dogs with me on a joy ride around town, checking for flooding. Results were mixed.

The nearest arroyo (wash) to Calle Mumble is the Alamo Wash, which crosses Calle Betelgeux next to the high school athletic field behind 22nd and Kolb. As I approach, it just looks like a few inches of water crossing a dip in the road. And on Thursday, the water really wasn't all that deep on the road itself.

But look to the right as you drive slowly through the water, heading east. There's a pretty little green river, brought into existence by a floodplain and a few days or rain. Trees grow along the arroyo, taking advantage of seasonal and unseasonal rain, and sending down a taproot into the aquifer below. The result is a riparian habitat, which supports a very different set of plants and animals than one finds in the surrounding desert. Keeping these areas from being destroyed by overpumping groundwater or constraining the water flow too much is an ongoing challenge, especially since the occasional flood can be very destructive to surrounding property. But this particular stretch of the Alamo Wash is pretty and peaceful, at least on the south side of Betelgeux.

From there we went to the Pantano River, also called Pantano Wash. Here the damage is done from the lowered water table. Water flows sometimes, but even the significant rainfall of Thursday and the days preceding it was insufficient to bring much more than a strip of dampness to the stretch of the river near 22nd St at Pantano Parkway.

After that we turned around and went in the other direction, all the way to the dog park. There was definitely flooding there. The dogs took it in stride, and Pepper in particular ended up with muddy paws.

When we left the dog park, I decided to go back to Alamo Wash for more pictures. This is the view looking north as one crosses the water, going east on Betelgeux. This is where shopping carts, recycle bins and other detritus sometimes wash up. It's also where kids occasionally hang out, on or under the little bridge.

Neighborhood flooding isn't confined to that one little strip of road. Here's some more, a block or two away.

A different stretch of Alamo Wash runs past the neighborhood park. The woman in the photo above is carrying the smaller of her two dogs past the stretch of flowing water.

Safely past the wash, the terrier resumes its walk.

And here is the stretch of Alamo Wash immediately south of where the terrier was carried. Tucson Clean and Beautiful is looking for someone to adopt each of these stretches of Alamo Wash, but I think overall they're in pretty good shape. At least, they were on Thursday!

Karen

The Lunchtime Commute as an Extreme Sport

A Message from Tuesday's Karen:
The way things are going at the moment, it's becoming clear that this entry, a photo essay, can't be completed tonight. You see, I did buy the SONY Vaio for $599.99, and it's currently copying files from my external hard drive. Guess where my edited photos for this entry are? You've got it - on my external hard drive! So I'm going to save this to draft, do a quick entry about the computer instead, and finish this Wednesday night. See you then!

Okay, it's Wednesday night and I've made much progress on setting up the VAIO. My Word docs and photos are on it now, I've installed Office 2003, PhotoStudio 5.5 and Firefox, and even managed to track down and copy in my AOL saved mail and such. At the moment it looks as though the only major casualties of changing computers are OmniPage SE (a free version of OCR software, but not Vista compatible), and the software that came with my current camera (I can't find the CD, but I didn't like it anyway). So. Time to double back and tell you folks about yesterday's storm.

Oh, I knew it was raining. How could I not? It was 2 PM Tuesday, and co-workers were congregated at that windows, looking out on the worst storm so far this year. I was reminded of a line from Arizona 101, a book we bought when we got to town 21 years ago: "When everyone rushes to the windows, it's raining." Yup!


I didn't have an umbrella with me, or a jacket, or a hat, but I went home for lunch anyway. Partly it was to eat a cheap lunch out of the freezer (got to economize to pay for this computer!), but mostly I wanted to experience the fully glory of the storm, even if it meant getting soaked! And I did. I was parked not only "beyond the berm," but in one of the furthest possible spaces, behind a different company's building - the best space available when I'd arrived at work, later than most people. It was raining hard and the parking lot was under several inches of water. I even saw a whirlpool over a storm drain beyond the berm. By the time I got to my car I was thoroughly soaked.

And this is what I saw when I got in - a windshield with darn near zero visibility, and a temperature reading about 20 degrees cooler than it had been 4 1/2 hours earlier.

Driving home was a real challenge, not just because of the flooding, but because the visibility was kind of poor. It wasn't the worst I've driven in, but it was the worst in AZ. The very worst was on a fogged-in freeway near Pomona, California. The second worst was driving the Bee Line between Orlando and Cape Canaveral in a torrential downpour, back when the Bee Line had hardly any exits, no shoulders, and alligator-infested canals on either side of the road.

To be honest, I should admit that I saw the road a little better than the camera did. This photo is unedited except for resizing and a "sharpen lightly."

It was still challenging driving, though, that stretch of three miles or so along Wilmot. And Calle Mumble was a lake again.

I got home safely, threw my shirt in the dryer and grabbed my jacket to wear on the return trip. By the time I went back to work, the storm was mostly over, but not the flooding.


When I left the office, the clouds were doing that cool thing they do over the slopes of the Catalinas. The roads were well on their way to being dry. I decided to drive over to the wash behind the high school, and see whether it was passable. It was.


And kids were hanging out in the wash itself.

My squelching shoes didn't dry until late in the evening, but the streets were almost dry at 8 PM when I drove across town to buy the laptop. Good thing, too!

Karen

When Floods Are Fun

Looking north on Wilmot. Where did the mountains go?

Floods can be horrible, destructive things. I know this. Even here in Tucson, people occasionally die in washes and rivers during flash floods. Sabino Canyon was massively damaged by flooding a year ago, with 70-year-old bridges destroyed. And let's not even talk about the flooding that comes with hurricanes.

Police direct traffic at Broadway and Wilmot

But the kind of flooding we've had in Tucson this weekend isn't one of those bad ones, at least, not as far as I know. We've have 1.55 inches of rain in the past 48 hours, but the worst thing I've seen happen because of it was the traffic lights out at Broadway and Wilmot.

A temporary "river" at St. Michael's waters the plants

As if in defiance of my entry of last night, today's weather did not follow the usual pattern of blue sky in the morning, a buildup of clouds and then rain in the late afternoon and evening. It rained at 6:30 AM or so, something I discovered when nervous Tuffy came into the bedroom and woke me up by standing on my hair. That rain stopped after a while, but started up again in the early afternoon, and ended about an hour before sunset.

I set out around 3 PM in the car, looking for things to photograph, but it was still raining, and so I didn't want to slog my way to the Pantano River on foot. So I headed out to 5th and Wilmot, and got a few pictures of the flooding at St. Michael's - always a good time.

This shot's for you, Becky. Drainage at St. Michael's.

I set out around 3 PM in the car, looking for things to photograph, but it was still raining, and so I didn't want to slog my way to the Pantano River on foot. So I headed out to 5th and Wilmot, and got a few pictures of the flooding at St. Michael's - always a good time. The parking lot at St. Michael's drains into some kind of sewer thing or drainage ditch, but it doesn't make much difference when it rains and inch and a half in two days!

Flooding at Fifth & Wilmot, near the Crosswalk of Death

See? There's serious flooding in the road and on the sidewalk, just steps away from that culvert, including a little bit of whitewater rapids.

"Safeway Pond"

One last picture for tonight. This has been at the edge of the Safeway shopping center for several days, I think. It really does look like a deliberate pond, kind of pretty and peaceful. If this were Manlius, it would be the right size for a skating rink. No chance of that here! But taking pictures of the monsoon is more fun than ice skating, anyway.

Karen

Gullywasher 2007

Flooding on Calle Mumble, 7/27/07

Oh, yes! We're having a good monsoon so far! We only have a couple of inches recorded at the airport for the 2007 monsoon since it started a couple of weeks ago, but that's almost as much as we got for the entire 2004 rainy season. Plus I think we've had more rain up and down my Wilmot stomping grounds than at the airport. Aside from plant debris and a few accidents I've seen no damage, just lots of dramatic rain to refill our chronically depleted aquifer.

One of the nice things about the Arizona monsoon is the timing of the storms. I've remarked before that it resembles the lyrics to the title song from Camelot, the bit about about it not raining until after sundown. Occasionally it rains as early as 2 PM or so, but usually it's 4 PM or later, sometimes as late as midnight. So today I was able to take the car for emissions testing at lunchtime, and not run into a drop of rain. That hit around 4 PM. By the time I drove home around 6:30 or 7 PM, there was one heavy squall for about a block, but the rain was mostly over with. While it was here though, it dumped a huge amount of water throughout my neighborhood, as I discovered when I tried to drive home with a "to go" order from Mama's Pizza.


This is a wash near Palo Verde High School. It crosses the main back street route between Kolb and Wilmot behind 22nd Street. In more than a decade of living in this neighborhood, I've seen this wash run with water a few times each summer, usually just a few inches deep in the street itself. With maybe one exception, I don't remember it ever being deep enough to turn me away from crossing it - until tonight. See that spot in the middle of the water there? That's a box or a tire or something, washing away.


I drove closer, not intending to cross, but just to take a better picture. Yes, this was swift and maybe a foot deep, a Stupid Motorists Law situation waiting to happen. See, every year, rescue services get called out to pull cars out of washes. The driver then gets hit with a bill for being rescued from the results of his or her stupidity. But the wash behind the Palo Verde football field is usually not more than three or four inches deep as it crosses Calle Betelgeux. No real danger in that. Tonight, though, I was one of a number of drivers who turned around and headed off another way.

The detour didn't help much. I soon came upon more flooding, and little choice but to cross it, unless I wanted to double back all the way to Kolb! Seeing that the motor home had already crossed, I chanced it. No problem.

Uh-oh. Trying to turn right after crossing the lesser flooding, I saw another part of the same wash that's behind Palo Verde. The motor home driver clearly had decided not to cross it. The vehicle on the other side of the wash turned around rather than driving through. The woman and the dog, well, they didn't seem too worried, but they didn't go wading, either.

So I backed up and drove on, trying to find another way through. I came across yet a third piece of that same wash, again impressively deep. In the end I had to double back all the way to Kolb Road, a mile east of Wilmot. There was no other way to reach Wilmot except via the main roads, either 22nd or Golf Links. I went with Golf Links.

And yes, in the end, John's pizza slice and I got home safely.

I love the monsoon!

Karen

NWS Monsoon Tracker - Rainfall

Current Conditions - Tucson Intl Airport