triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Rain Flurries

It is obviously global warming, if Milwaukee is the globe and the last twenty four hours amount to a long term trend. It has been raining kittens and puppies here, altho since it got dark there has been thunder and lightning in the distance. We are under a flood watch right now (along with a fog advisory), not because of the volume of rain, but because snow and ice leave it no place to go.

Fortunately, our house is on high ground. We wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Long before we moved here, we used to come up every summer to attend the State Fair and tent camp in the State Forest. We were here on August 6th, 1987, when rainclouds parked over the city and opened up. Among the records: 1.10 inches in 5 minutes, 3.06 inches in 1 hour, 5.24 inches in 2 hours, 6.24 in 6 hours and 6.84 inches in 24 hours. Floodwaters were four feet deep at the Milwaukee County Stadium (there was a clip of groundskeepers in a rowboat on the evening news), and floodwaters filled the basement of the main terminal at the airport. Flooding caused 5.9 million dollars damage, and claimed the life of one person. Another child might have drowned, but a neighbor dove off his porch and swam across his lawn to rescue her.