My Little Town Makes the News

We had a wild time last night, for a while at least.  It began when Mother Nature made her presence known around 8 p.m. with a barrage of thunder.

And then the storm hit - all at once.  Now I should mention that we're used to high winds and heavy rains out here.  We get beat up pretty regularly in the winter months by storms raging out of the Bering Sea.   Not too distant is the port town of Ucluelet, near where they've had 420 mm. of rain in 24 hours.   Average rainfall on the coast varies from 2,500 to over 4 metres per year.

The intensity of last night's storm was wicked - both in wind and in rain intensity.  My street turned into a river.   Fortunately we're just a block away from a cliff and beneath that is the ocean.  We don't flood but lower-lying parts of town did last night.

The saving grace is that the deluge lasted just 18-minutes but in that brief span of time it dropped 33 mm. of rain, an inch and a quarter.  It overwhelmed the storm sewers as water was blasted in sheets off roofs.




Our storm seemed to pass almost as suddenly as it arrived.   By the time nightfall set in, the sky was completely clear and, aided by our power failure, we had no ambient light to interfere with the spectacular night sky.