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One of the great photo of the rain in downtown Vancouver by the CBC! My photos sucked. Click the image to go to the CBC item.[/caption]
Last night's heavy, heavy rain, and thunderstorm was a short, sharp, shock, which overwhelmed the city's drainage capacity, and largely caught everyone by surprise -- it's at least a month early for this sort of rain. According to this CBC item, Vancouver only received between 12 and 18 mm of precipitation. That's 0.7 inches, so no records were in danger. But it was overwhelmingly fast. The storm came, and went inside of an hour, with the heaviest rainfall occurring in a span of minutes. The accompanying thunderstorm was a rarity, speaking as a 30-year resident of Vancouver. According to the CBC item, nearly 1,000 lightning strikes were recorded during the hour-long storm which dumped 17 mm of rain on the downtown area of Vancouver.
In the Fairview neighbourhood, my little patch of homeless-sweet-home, everything's downhill, sloping South to North; down towards False Creek. All the the North-South streets became impromptu streams flowing into False Creek. Spruce is one of those streets and, as I mentioned in the earlier post, on the South-side corners of Spruce at Broadway, the water was ankle deep. The North-flowing water scoured the middle of North-South streets like Spruce, and Hemlock, so this morning you could see decently thick mud in the curb-side lanes.
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An apartment building near 12th Avenue has this lovely new water feature. Click to enlarge the image.[/caption]
As I binned the Fairview lanes this morning, I noticed how clean the alleys looked, and I noticed a number of busy building managers and flood remediation company trucks scattered around the neighbourhood. One manager of a building on 10th Avenue, Diane, described how the water had pooled about three inches deep in the alley behind her building, and how she, and other neighbouring managers had been up till at least 3 a.m. cleaning up. A few lanes South, a building manager was moving the dregs of mud out of the building's inset, sub-ground level parking area. The water poured down into it so much faster than it could drain that it began to fill like a pool, causing flooding in some ground floor apartments.
Diane complained that she, and other managers she talked to, weren't sufficiently warned by the media about the storm and it;s potential severity. Environment Canada did issue a heavy rainfall warning, in which the oncoming storm was characterized here as a "moist front." So an actual "wet front" would be what -- a giant tsunami?
All-in-all, a perfect disaster for Vancouver: No severe damage, no injuries that anyone is reporting, but it offers unlimited opportunities for indignation ("I swear, my street was a raging river! What's up with the storm drains?"), and embellishment ("There were freakin' spawning salmon swimming up my street!"); all suitable for chit-chat over a half-caf at Starbucks.
One of the great photo of the rain in downtown Vancouver by the CBC! My photos sucked. Click the image to go to the CBC item.[/caption]Last night's heavy, heavy rain, and thunderstorm was a short, sharp, shock, which overwhelmed the city's drainage capacity, and largely caught everyone by surprise -- it's at least a month early for this sort of rain. According to this CBC item, Vancouver only received between 12 and 18 mm of precipitation. That's 0.7 inches, so no records were in danger. But it was overwhelmingly fast. The storm came, and went inside of an hour, with the heaviest rainfall occurring in a span of minutes. The accompanying thunderstorm was a rarity, speaking as a 30-year resident of Vancouver. According to the CBC item, nearly 1,000 lightning strikes were recorded during the hour-long storm which dumped 17 mm of rain on the downtown area of Vancouver.
In the Fairview neighbourhood, my little patch of homeless-sweet-home, everything's downhill, sloping South to North; down towards False Creek. All the the North-South streets became impromptu streams flowing into False Creek. Spruce is one of those streets and, as I mentioned in the earlier post, on the South-side corners of Spruce at Broadway, the water was ankle deep. The North-flowing water scoured the middle of North-South streets like Spruce, and Hemlock, so this morning you could see decently thick mud in the curb-side lanes.
Meanwhile, in Fairview, the building managers manage
[caption id="attachment_4691" align="alignnone" width="497"]
An apartment building near 12th Avenue has this lovely new water feature. Click to enlarge the image.[/caption]As I binned the Fairview lanes this morning, I noticed how clean the alleys looked, and I noticed a number of busy building managers and flood remediation company trucks scattered around the neighbourhood. One manager of a building on 10th Avenue, Diane, described how the water had pooled about three inches deep in the alley behind her building, and how she, and other neighbouring managers had been up till at least 3 a.m. cleaning up. A few lanes South, a building manager was moving the dregs of mud out of the building's inset, sub-ground level parking area. The water poured down into it so much faster than it could drain that it began to fill like a pool, causing flooding in some ground floor apartments.
Diane complained that she, and other managers she talked to, weren't sufficiently warned by the media about the storm and it;s potential severity. Environment Canada did issue a heavy rainfall warning, in which the oncoming storm was characterized here as a "moist front." So an actual "wet front" would be what -- a giant tsunami?
All-in-all, a perfect disaster for Vancouver: No severe damage, no injuries that anyone is reporting, but it offers unlimited opportunities for indignation ("I swear, my street was a raging river! What's up with the storm drains?"), and embellishment ("There were freakin' spawning salmon swimming up my street!"); all suitable for chit-chat over a half-caf at Starbucks.
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