I awoke this morning to sunshine through my window and the sounds of a bird chirping. My guess is that it was carrying an olive branch.
Only Shirley Manson could have enjoyed what happened yesterday. Gary England chose to open the flood gates and nearly toppled the dam at Ski Island. While ten inches of rain fell over a period of just a few hours (including the morning rush period), most of us who live in the city were stuck at home unable to maneuver our neighborhood streets without a gondola. Meanwhile, those who commute in unwittingly drove into enough water to turn their vehicles into pontoon boats.
Then, of course, there were hundreds of houses near overflowed drainage ditches or just in low lying areas who started to wonder if Toby Keith was going to shout "Barack Obama don't care about rednecks," during a live telecast while Mike Myers would laugh uncomfortably.
During all of this, I was stuck at home watching Rick Mitchell who gave me no hope of the rain ever letting up. On the radar, he showed how the storm would regenerate at the source whenever it started to move a little. The reporters in the field took this information and passed on every bit of apaqualyptic knowledge they could find...even after the rain finally did stop. My favorite moment was watching, I believe, Erin Guy stand outside a Starbucks at Penn & Memorial basically scolding him for not cutting to her sooner. "The water used to be up to this curb," she told him while the camera showed a Krispy Kreme that was suddenly lakefront property. But, it just wasn't extreme enough anymore.
This type of coverage kept up for hours after the water finally slowed down enough for the sewers to catch up. Old footage was recycled and played off like live footage keeping people like me home well after roads were passable again. So, when I finally did venture out, against the protests of Mrs. Matthews, I barely splashed in puddles.
Of course, that is not to downplay the immediate effects of the torrential rain. It does make me wonder if Louisiana has made their amends with God making Oklahoma the new punching bag. In the past six months, we have had:
- A Christmas blizzard
- Tornados during snowstorms
- Ordinary run of the mill tornadoes
- Hail storms of biblical proportions
- A foot of rain in one morning
Now, I'm hearing a plague of grasshoppers may take the place of locusts...and I don't know about you, but as a first born son, I am more than a little scared.
