Man vs Mother Nature

Over the course of 60%, maybe even 75%,  of the summer, my mom would call me every day from Connecticut to tell me it was raining.  Again.  On the few days when it didn’t rain, she’d send an email and in all caps she’d scream: IT’S NOT RAINING TODAY!!!  Then, on many days she’d send an email that said: IT RAINED 6 INCHES IN TWO HOURS!!!  I started to feel bad but the message began to get boring.  I couldn’t really understand why she was sending a weather report every day.

Now I get it.

It has done nothing here but rain for at least a week.  And I don’t mean drizzle, I mean POUR.  It’s getting a little boring.  It’s also getting dangerous.  According to my husband, who doesn’t sleep as soundly as I do, it monsooned all night long (according to the news there was over a foot of rain last night).  It rained so much, that counties are closed.  As in, don’t leave your house, don’t get in your car, schools are closed and so on. Those are the messages they’re sending out on the news.

And while it’s getting just a little dull staying in the house for fear of getting a little wet, it’s getting too dangerous to get into your car.  But on some levels it’s almost too dangerous to stay home. Sure there are your basement floods and there are your washed out roads.  But now there are cars that are being swept away, swept into creeks and people are dying.  A mobile home that was near a creek actually split in half and the three year old boy who was in the home is gone.  Missing.  I just can’t imagine.  One news report I read said that people were rescued from trees, while clinging to their babies.  I don’t even know what to make of it.

We tend to think, “Oh, it’s just a little rain.  It’s no big deal.”  But it is a big deal.  I know there are parts of the country that get this kind of rain often.  You hear stories on the news about people getting together with sandbags to stop the rise of the creeks and rivers.  But that doesn’t happen here in Atlanta.  At least not that I have heard of in the past 15 years.  There are these HUGE puddles in the road that you drive through, thinking, “Oh, it’s just a little water” but you don’t know why that huge puddle is there.  Until your car falls in.  And you drown.  Yesterday a woman tried to help a motorist who spun out in the rain on the highway.  She was struck by a passing truck and plunged 80 feet to the interstate below her.  She was just trying to help.

We always joke that people here can’t drive in the rain.  A drop or two fall from the sky and there’s gridlock and accidents and all kinds of trouble.  But this isn’t a drop or two.  This is torrential rain.  It may sound drastic but when the authorities tell us to stay home, they probably have a reason.