wetwetwetwetwet

You know it's really raining when the intercom at the school goes off and the office manager of the school comes on and says stuff like "Please use the front doors only and keep the side doors closed. The rain's getting in to the classrooms!" and then half an hour later "All students who live on Swanton Road, call your parents -- a mandatory evacuation has been called for Swanton Road and you can't go home --"

Swanton Road is just below the big burn that happened a month ago, which means massive landslides in weather like this, all over the roads and houses. Also, the radio keeps being interrupted with automated emergency broadcast network announcements about flash flood warnings for different areas along the coast. And small craft advisory which means "fishermen, sailors, kayakers and surfers, stay home for the love of all that lives, you will die out there."

24-hour rainfall totals, Santa Cruz County

From the NOAA site, we learn this:


SAN CRUZ COUNTY
BOUC1 LAS CUMBRS PK 2760`......... 5.47
BNDC1 BEN LOMD RAWS 2630`......... 7.53
BUSC1 BURRELL FIRE 1850`.......... 5.24
DAPC1 DAVENPORT 10`............... 2.04
RRDC1 RIDER ROAD 1123`............ 4.53
EKNC1 EUREKA CANYON 1700`......... 5.63
SOQC1 SOQUEL 21`.................. 2.91
PVYC1 PLEASNT VALLEY 360`......... 2.56
CTOC1 CORRALITOS RAWS............. 4.35

Sorry abut the antiquated measurement system, those are inches. This is the first measurable rain since May. To put it into perspective, Ben Lomond gets about 60 inches of rain average (up to 80 in a really disaastrously wet year). Lower elevations get more like 30 inches a year, 20 in South County (the sites are listed north to south).

To put it another way, nine more days like this would fill our quota (but not end the not-quite-official drought, if we really got all the rain in ten days of storm: that would result in all the rain running out to sea and nothing left behind for the watersheds, streams or underground).

Stuff is going to wash down the hillsides, especially the burned-over ones.