I'll admit that I wasn't all that excited about starting work an hour early today to cover Part III of the Coachella Valley's rainy week.
It's not that I don't like weather. I took (and loved) Intro to Meteorology in college, and you know I like to do a First Alert Forecast every now and again.
It's just that so many people had talked up this third storm as having the potential to be one for the ages, but most of the meteorologists I had talked to earlier in the week didn't seem ready to call this set of storms something that hadn't been seen in decades.
Well, Wednesday's and Thursday's rainfall totals both set records across the Coachella Valley and although the conditions out there were somewhat less than apocalyptic, I was impressed with just how much storm news really was out there to chase today and grateful that TDS had assembled a whole Storm Team of sorts to try to tackle as much of it as we could.
I spent the early morning hours trying to keep up with an ever-growing list of road closures from the office. Oh, and I also busted out my Ginger-imitating skills and did a quick standup for mydesert.com:
But my day got a whole lot more exciting when we heard about a roof collapse over the scanner and I headed out to the Ross Dress for Less at the Palm Springs Mall, where built up rainwater had caused a 20-foot-by-30-foot section of the store's roof to collapse.
Being the desert dweller that I am, I left my jacket in the office and didn't think to get my umbrella out of my car when I got to the mall, so after a bunch of tromping around in the rain whilst reporting and e-mailing quotes back to the newsroom, I realized that not only were my feet and ankles wet from walking amid puddles, but the rest of me was pretty soaked too.
That situation required a lunchtime wardrobe change, but soon I was relatively dry and back in the newsroom. Then, I ran out to a reported water rescue — with my jacket on and umbrella at the ready — that ended up being less catastrophic than it sounded. But the amount of water on Ramon Road east of Varner Road was still pretty freakin' impressive. On my way back, I lost the road closure game and got to see even more of the street flooding across the western part of the valley.
Those afternoon experiences got me thinking about just how crazy things get out on the roads when it rains here. I mean, a few times over the years that I lived in Arizona, things got rather wet and/or wild, and apparently the conditions are rather intense there tonight. But back in the Valley of the Sun, I never saw anything like the widespread road closures that pop up across the Coachella Valley when it rains — especially when it rains as much as it has lately.
I suppose that's partially because of when I lived in Arizona. By the time I moved there, almost every major road that crossed the Salt River did so via a bridge, unlike back when roads like Rural and Alma School crossed the riverbed and then during the big rains of 19-something-or-other, traffic backed up beyond belief on Mill Avenue because it was one of very few bridges crossing the no-longer-dry Salt River. Back then, perhaps the Valley of the Sun wasn't so different from the Coachella Valley, where a number of major roads cross the Whitewater Wash at ground level.
But anyway, like I said, I found today's weather-related news all rather exciting. And you can see a few scenes from across the valley overlaid on my second attempt at beating Ginger at her own game:
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