The 100 Year Rainfall

Hi All!

Hard to believe that 20 short years have transpired since the mother of all rain storms drowned the Twin Cities.

We lived in a cute bungalow on Randolph near my old alma mater, Cretin High.

Although the house was on an elevation, we had nagging basement water seepage since we soon-to-be newlyweds bought the place in 1980.

We spent quite a bit to alleviate the problem and it was solved enough for us to finish the basement as my office/computer room (and believe me, a computer took up big room in 1986).

My good friend, blogger extraordinaire Mitch of Shot in the Dark relates his own nightmare of that July 24, 1987 night of endless downpour.

He got trapped on the freeway with a leaking ragtop Jeep and writes a good story about it as linked above.

Our experience was in-house.

The 21 inches of rain that fell in a few short hours was overwhelming. Water was literally shooting through the basement walls as if from a fire plug and the whole night was spent sucking water into the Shop Vac and running to the laundry room to empty it out and back and forth it went for about 8 hours.

As morning broke, the flow was down to a seep and we had managed not to let much water get into the newly finished office space.

Totally spent, we celebrated. We won!

I was so tired I couldn't sleep so I headed out into the beautiful clear morning to check things out.

The most lasting impression I have is standing on the Randolph bridge over what would some day become I-35E but was just a dirt culvert. It looked like the Mississippi. I'll bet one could kayak all the way from Jefferson to Shepard Road.

One year later at the same time and in our new home in Falcon Heights, the grass and shrubs were dying in the midst of a record drought.

Mother Nature -- Gotta love her. She do what she pleases to us puny little ants that crawl about the earth and worry that we need to put on hair shirts and sacrifice our economy at the altar of the unholy Church of Global Warming.

Cheers!