Tuesday, August 01, 2006

2 inches

Yesterday evening a rain storm sneaked up on us. In an about an hour it dumped an inch and a half or so of rain on us and most of Albuquerque and continued south to flood out several of the small towns along the Rio Grande River. We needed the rain, but slower would have been better. I didn't have time to get the horses out of the field and into their smaller pens with the shelter, not that they got hurt by standing in the rain. In fact they all needed a bath but of course they decided to roll in the mud instead. Finally, when it didn't look like the rain was going to let up Lee and I went for it, put on rain coats, and moved horses into shelters. Good thing we did as we found that there was a lake in our driveway with water coming into the garage because the ditch that was around the side of the garage to divert water had, in the past 2 years since we had got this kind of a down pour, filled in with sand. Lee grabbed a shovel and dug it out but we already had an inch of water in the garage. Nothing was really hurt, and all will dry. And what we had was minor compared to what some people experenced. Several hundred people in the small comunities south of us were evacuated when a couple of dranage ditches, and an irigation ditch broke their banks, as well as several dirt roads were washed out for the second or third time since our monsoon rains have hit.
You ask - is the drought over yet? No, of course not. A drought is never over in the desert. However much we get it is always to much at once, and most of it just runs off, causing flash floods in the arroyos, and dirt roads, and even some of the paved streets in the cities.
Has it helped? Yes, but we need more to get out of the drought that has made the water table so low in so many places in New Mexico, Arizona, Neveda, California, and other southwestern deserts.
But the high heat that the whole US is having doesn't help anyone.

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