Craziness I tell ya!

So we've been in a drought for oh...say ten to fifteen years now here in Utah. I believe this past winter was our first sign that we were starting to come out of it, but then this summer has been so dry. Lots of lightning but no rain.

Until today!

Today was all the rain from all those lightning storms piled into one storm. This enormous black cloud parked itself over our little section of the world and unloaded months worth of rain on us in the space of about an hour.


And when it poured, I mean it POURED! We had to take our van in to be serviced because our AC died. And of course, we had to take it right as this storm started so we were caught in the very worst of it. The boys and I sat in the car while B was in the office, caught there by the sudden burst of the storm, and we watched huge hail pellets hammer our poor little car, I thought for sure we were going to be replacing windows before this was all said and done. This storm and it's fury freaked me out so bad that sitting in my little hail beaten car I called my mom, she had to hear this. It was nuts! I kept waiting for the tornado to come ripping through but luckily, no tornado's this time around. The hail seemed like it was being dumped by the bucket full, it was piling up all over the place. And it totally demolished trees, flowers, and gardens!




Excuse these pictures of the roads, they were taken with B's cell phone. The other pictures are from the local news website KSL.com

This is the street we were driving down...it was up to the bottom of our doors in places. I just knew we were going to be washed away in our itty bitty Escort with the bald tires. Can you see the waves? The water is completely up over the sidewalks and onto the grass at this point.


This is the intersection of 5400 S and Bangerter, on the news they said the water here was anywhere from 2" to 24" deep. I would say where we were at when this picture was taken it was in the 2"-3" range but it was flowing very fast, it literally looked like a river across all eight lanes. On the edges where it curved down it was much deeper.


Kitty corner from where we were sitting when the above picture was taken there is a steep drop off with some apartments down at the bottom. The water was just sluicing over that hill and down that drop. B and I were talking about how they were sure to have flooding if this rain continued much longer.
Little did we know what they were really in store for...




And then, when the saturated hillside could no longer stand up to the deluge of water...



Our neighborhood, being on the side of the mountain, fared much better than my MIL who is downhill from us. She got tons of hail, and the streets were all flooded in her neighborhood. We had lots of water, and I don't think anyone will be harvesting anything from their demolished gardens this year, but we have no water damage to structures. The worst our neighborhood got was a pooling of water at the bottom of the hill and it only made it midway up the driveways so no house damage. And some dirt run off so our streets are a big muddy mess. Unlike these poor people...





So snuggle up in your nice cozy home tonight and say a little prayer for all those families who can't go home. Keep your fingers crossed that the damage to their homes is minimal.

And I will go upstairs once again to comfort my poor little traumatized kiddos. Nothing happened to us today, but the storm has them so freaked out that the current thunder, lightning, and rain going on outside their window is making them nervous and unable to sleep.

I am very thankful to live on a hill, I am very thankful to live on a hill, I will not count in dollars and cents how much gas my little car burns climbing this huge hill every day LOL