Weather update

Night before last my wife was having a helluva time trying to find something to watch from the 120 channels plus we have on TV when she accidentally stumbled across one of those channels like Discovery or some such. I'm not real familiar with them because I don't watch much TV. So when I saw it was a program on climate change and their affects of lost civilizations, I sank into an easy chair.

I was thinking it may have even been a program I'd seen before but as it progressed, I wasn't so sure. Of course, as I learned about the demise of the Mayans I sensed where this was going. I had to stay for the end.

I don't have much time to write this morning. That's because of the representative Sensenbrenner charades hearing is being held today and I hope to tag along with my wife who plans to demonstrate outside his appearance at The Chamizal. But I'd like to take what few minutes I have to share a little more with you about our local weather as perhaps just another harbinger of greater changes being felt globally. Weather changes taken collectively which over time become climate changes?

Previously, I wrote some about the floods that had occurred locally while we were away on vacation. Of a couple of homes in our very neighborhood that were damaged when the raging waters overwhelmed drainage systems. Walking around the neighborhood after our return from Oregon only hinted at what had happened as crews had been working a couple of days trying to erase the evidence. The sounds made of metal on concrete and pavement, the chirping sounds of heavy equipment when it backs up and the rumble of dump trucks nearby have been the constant background noise of our normally quiet neighborhood since our return. That's because, unlike all the other summer monsoon rains we've experienced in our 28 years in this house have come and gone quietly sans much damage. But this summer they don't want to leave.

One of the regular readers here at Dada's had asked if I might not post some pics of the 'hood. I thought that a good idea but nixed it after looking at some I took. They just weren't all that dramatic. Besides, it seems I'd employed my best hyperbole when I echoed here my neighbor's opinion those homes would have to either be gutted or destroyed.

Well, in the last two weeks, the course of my regular morning walks has been past these houses and the apartments just behind them--the first line of defense against the waters that come raging off the mountain. And I've documented in my mind the events at those homes, now abandoned. Briefly, it goes like this:

Mounds of dirt taken from their overwhelmed backyards rose neatly in the street in front of them. Both houses were abandoned, with windows and doors left open to speed drying inside.

Then came the debris of household goods piled outside that had been lost. In one pile, I saw the discarded boxes of four large box fans. Walking past this house early one morning, I could see and hear the fans though open windows, quietly circulating the air.

A day or two later came the furniture stacked outside beside a rental truck to cart it away to someplace dryer. Then one morning piles of saturated sheetrock were there. I could see inside approximately the bottom two feet of wall had been stripped from their frames. New walls to replace them were then installed. And then, earlier this week, the rains came--again.

These are the "normal" rains from the 28 year weather we've observed while living here. Maybe these are just freak rains. Or maybe they're worse. Harbingers of climate change? For those poor houses and their people working feverishly to reclaim them, they must have realized this past Monday that, without solving their drainage problem, new walls become wasted walls real fast. The new sheetrock absorbs water just as well as old sheetrock. Their efforts had been for naught. The new walls had gotten soaked.

But these are just a couple of families in our neighborhood with "leak problems." Images of people escaping their homes in waist high water are now common on local news channels.

So yesterday I had a 2:00 o'clock appointment at the car dealership to have our oil changed. As my appt. time neared the clouds blackened and sagged. Ignoring the urgings of my wife to cancel, I decided to risk keeping it. My shortest route was over the mountain, a distance of about 12 miles to the other side of town. It was harrowing. Like a scene out of a disaster movie. The desert rock overhangs were raging waterfalls and in spots, earthen debris had washed across the highway. As I drove along, it became easy to imagine being buried and crushed beneath the landsliding crags of rock above.

But I made it to my appointment just before the storm hit there. When it did and the electricity went out, I learned the flaws of their state-of-the-art new facilities. Fortunately you don't need electricity to change oil but as we learned, you do need it to flush urinals, draw water or paper towels in the restrooms. The free coke dispensers quit. The coffee and free popcorn soon went cold. And most importantly, when it came time to pay, credit and debit cards were worthless. Apparently without those little electronic sliders, cashiers and their managers have forgotten how make a charge on plastic. Returning home, I opted to advoid the mountain. I took the longer way, through town.

Water continues to deepen its new streambed beneath an apartment
parking lot with each good rain behind the two houses it loves to hit most.

It was a long trip but to traffic's credit, drivers were exceedingly civil and slowed to safer distances. Driving was like playing one of those action video games that have you leaning forward in your seat, squinting to see thru the water on the screen to the outside world in front of you.

But the hairiest part of my round trip was the last three blocks after I turned off the freeway frontage road into my neighborhood. The side street was raging with water, the deepest I had been in the entire trip. And as I slowed to the speed of a small outboard motored boat, I saw the mud that had once more buried the apartment parking lot. Many of the people living on the lower floors of the apartments had their front doors open. Some were standing outside in what struck me as a kind of neighborhood social, but this was no picnic. As I turned past the two houses, I noted a worker in the first desperately squeegeeing water out its front door. The second house had streams racing down each of its sides into its frontyard and out into the street. The garage door, wide open, revealed residents who had been working on the house sitting around a table in quiet resignation of Nature.

As I walked there to survey the damage this morning, I encountered a neighbor I'd never spoken with before. I related the surreal scene yesterday afternoon with many people standing outside their apartments and homes commiserating in disbelief that this was happening again. He said to me, incredulously, that it was a blessing. Then mentioned something about the Lord. The people in the two homes damaged at the end of the block had shelters to go to. They would be okay, he said. But without these floods, neighbors he'd lived next to for years but never spoken with would still be strangers.

Backyards of the two corner houses as they looked this morning after yesterday's storm.

What a strange Christianity I thought to myself. I guess it's easier to consider the floodwaters a blessing when it's not your home being damaged, it's not you who has to sleep in a shelter "somewhere, I don't know where in the city," as he said. With *blessings* like these, I wonder what that nice neighbor man might consider a curse?

Oh, and that Discovery channel hour on climate change as it has affected previous civilizations? Well, with the melting ice caps from global warming, ocean currents will be altered triggering a new (hopefully, only, mini ice age). The Easter US states will freeze to death, west coast will suffer tremendous land- and mudslides from the unheard of El Ninos. We here in the desert Southwest may be the luckiest. We'll just starve to death for lack of food.