We've had an INSANE amount of rain this month. More than 15". We average 3" in May, and 32" annually. There is a creekbed that runs behind my house in a forested valley. It had at least 4 or 5 FEET of water in it yesterday.
Here is what it looked like from a nearby road:
For comparison, the creek right there is only 1 foot under the surface of the road. The creekbed is usually dry, and is about 3 or 4 feet beneath where the water is now. That wasn't even the highest it got. It got high enough to cover the road right here with debris -- which means it was around 4 or 5 feet deep. Considering that this creekbed is dry, even when we get a fair amount of rain, this just goes to show how saturated the ground is here. It normally floods to maybe 1 foot deep even when we are getting 2" of rain an hour. We got rain about that hard yesterday, but the ground was so saturated that it all just ran off.
There were swift water rescues going on in downtown Austin (see here for instance), but it is nothing compared to the flooding that is happening downstream from us and to the south of us.
We were in the worst drought this area had seen since the 1890's, but now we are no longer in drought. Oddly enough, the storage reservoirs for Austin are still only at about 50% of max capacity, as there has not been nearly as much rain upstream. Lake Travis, the lower reservoir, is now above 50% full for the first time since 2010!
We are now expected to get more rain the rest of this week....
I really wish all this precipitation would go west of us, so that the reservoirs would fill and so that you people in California don't run out of water.
