In the desert–when it rains it floods.

I was headed home from grocery shopping, saw some cool cloud formations and decided to stop at Sugarhouse Park to get some pictures.

I also got this shot of a dad and his kid sledding down the hill.  Seems that wet grass can be as much fun as snow.

Then came the parade of cars driving the wrong way around the park.  I’ve seen this before, so at first I just thought it was some moron who thought their 2 minutes was more important than the safety of others.

But around the 4th car, I decided to go see what was going on that was causing all this anarchy.

Well, I got about 3/4 the way around the park and found out what was turning everyone back.  The creek running through the park was overflowing and flooding over the road.

It really wasn’t that deep, but recently in a small town on the border of Utah and Arizona an SUV and a van were swept down by a flash flood.  12 kids and adults were drowned, I can understand why people weren’t too anxious to forge through the water.

Although the ones that did cross had no problems at all.

It rained less than 1/10” in the city, maybe up to a quarter inch in the mountains.  But since all the runoff from the mountains get funneled into about a half dozen creeks going through the city, and it came down quite quickly, they tend to overflow and run out into the streets.  And the water can get moving pretty quickly.

I spent about a half hour walking around the park taking pictures and by the time I got back, the water had already ceded.  You can see how high the water got, where it pushed the leaves up to a line on the lawn.

And finally, it decided to rain on me again as I was heading home.  Even a little bit of hail to boot.  But, as typical here, it didn’t even last through the light I was stopped at.

Rough neighborhood.

The flooding in Salt Lake City during the spring of 1983 was certainly rough on the residents and businesses along 13^th South.

The road was closed and sand and sandbags were piled all along the sides of the road.

It was rough on drivers, the sand blocked north-south traffic on several of the biggest streets in the city.

Sometimes you had to go 20 blocks out of your way to get to where you were going.

And it certainly was rough on businesses that relied on people stopping in for lunch on the way to their destination.

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But leave it to the kids to find the silver lining. 

These one is certainly not having a rough time of it.

You know the drill by now – for many more really good “rough” pictures, click on the banner below.

 

Whose wine? What wine? Where the hell did I dine?

I woke this morning…and laid in bed watching my SG1 DVD for a while since it was Saturday.  Then I got up, made some coffee, grabbed the newspaper and relaxed for a while.  At 9:00 I called my friend Adele to see when she wanted to bleed the brakes on her MGB, and then started to get ready to go out and look at a car I wanted (more about that in another post, leave it at “10 MPG was killing me” for now). 

I brushed my teeth and turned on the water to wait for it to be warm enough to rinse with.  And waited.  and waited.  And turned the cold water off completely and waited.  And waited.  And thought “Oh, suminabeech, I just bought that water heater 3 or 4 years ago” and headed down to the basement with a mouth full of toothpaste to see what was wrong.

That’s what was wrong.  No the water heater hadn’t sprung a leak, fortunately.  The flex pipe coming out of it had, shooting water up in a arc, drenching the underside of the kitchen floorboards.  And it had been spewing water out into the basement for who knows how long.

Fortunately, it’s a dug out basement, and not completely dug out, so the water pretty rapidly soaks right into the ground, even though the dugout part does have a concrete floor. By 5:00 PM the floor was pretty dry.  And since this has happened before, as you can see in the picture below everything is either on the shelf or in a waterproof container.

So I head out to Home Depot to get a new flex hose.  Come home, take off the old one and put on the new one.  Great, the water problem is fixed, but at this point it’s only around 11:00 and there is too much water on the floor to restart the hot water heater.  So, I go help my friend with her car, which went quite smoothly.  We have some dinner and I head back to my house to see if I can get the water heater going again.  (Keep in mind, by this point I’ve worked on a water heater and a car, and have no hot water to take a shower.  Anybody want to come over and cuddle tonight?)

Well (hopefully it’s as simple as) things are still too soggy for me to get the pilot light going.  I’m going to have to let it dry out overnight and hope that it starts up tomorrow.  Even if it does, I’m not going to have hot enough water to take a shower until sometime in the afternoon.

Wish me luck, and if nobody comes by for the next couple days, I won’t blame ya.

“Went to a garden party…”

I walked over to the park today, expecting to see the pond well over it’s banks thanks to the recent warm weather.  Since several creeks in the city were supposed to be hitting levels high enough to reach bridges over them, I was surprised to find the pond at it’s normal level, the sidewalk around it was completely dry.

So I decided to get a picture of how it should look and show everyone the comparison with my picture in the last post.  First, the picture you’ve already seen:

And the way it should look, and does today:

I don’t know for sure, but one possibility is that this creek gets it’s water from lower elevations, which would have melted a lot sooner.  I know that the creek they were talking about on the news was from one of the Cottonwood Canyons, where 4 ski resorts reside, meaning that it gets it’s water from some of the higher elevations.

Or it could be because this creek is regulated by several reservoirs upstream, where the Cottonwood Canyons don’t have reservoirs (or just small ones) in them.

Or maybe it’s just because all those seagulls have been extremely thirsty the last couple of days?

More on flooding the desert.....

Here is the picture I took of the kid floating down 13th South on an inner tube; and here's a picture of me (age 23) standing at the curb on 13th South with the water rushing past my feet. The funny thing about my title is that floods occur a lot more often than you'd think in the desert. Because the land is not used to a lot of water, whenever it rains heavily - and it does at least a couple times a year - all the water gets funneled down the lowest path and creates a flash flood. Every year several people die in these floods here in Utah because they figure "flood, in the desert? no way!" But, alas, yes, way!
Click here if you want to see my entire Flood of '83 series....

Flooding in the desert and other funny stuff.

I've had a few pictures sitting on my desktop for a while and decided it was time to get them off there, so where else would I put them. Click here to see the rest of them.