We leave town for a few days and the sky is falling.  Two inches of rain in less than two hours! That sounds unheard of but that is typical for our Monsoon storms here in the Valley and elsewhere in Arizona.  Watching these videos and walking around in the subsequent drizzle last night I could only think of the comments made on James’ previous posts on rainwater harvesting.  There will always be naysayers but seriously folks, just think if we had a plan going into this to harvest all of that water instead of just directing it back to the Salt River, along with all of the trash on the highway.

Even if we just applied rain water collection techniques to the Arizona State University Campus, near where the news video was taken it could make a huge difference. Lets figure out what we could have saved.  If we estimate the ASU main campus to be about a square mile and say the rain is falling at about 2 inches per hour (50.88mm) then in one hour we could have collected ~34 million gallons of water! This sounds completely unbelievable, but according to this USGS page it is true. For information on collecting rainwater from your own property take a look at the Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands website.

Apart from thinking of water use I must admit I had a serious case of schadenfreude watching the youtube video. We have only a few poorly distributed storm sewers here in the desert and little to no culverts diverting water under roadways and this leads to flooding of streets on a predictable yearly basis.  It does not take much water or current to not only stop a car but to carry it off coarse stranding the driver.  The best bet is to not drive in flood waters at all, take a break, wait it out. It is still the desert and things run off and soak up within a relatively short amount of time.  I wasn’t the one waiting in that traffic though so I can see the desire if there is no other way and you’re in a hurry.  Admittedly, I kept hoping we would see them get stuck. I know, I know, it is awful for me to think that but really it takes very little to get your car stuck.  If your engine doesn’t cut off from getting wet it is easy to lose traction. A car only needs an inch or two to become buoyant and then even the slightest current can carry it off the road or into another car where it can be stranded while waters potentially continue to rise.  Hence the Stupid Motorist Law where people have to pay for their own rescue.. think this is atypical? Think again.

Here’s a video of what happens when the freeway floods and traffic is stopped dead in its tracks.
http://www.kpho.com/video/16871937/index.html

Video of a wash during this storm.

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